Interview with John Ballou

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1 His early work at Hanford Tritium with Roy Thompson 2 Eis work at Rochester - thorium 5 Thorium fuel cycle interview - see notes Second tape was not usable so this is only part of the

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here,(you e r e here in t w o installments), what the place was like when you were here earlier, what it loaked like,and what things had changed when yau got back - my thing you wish to tell of your own work Maybe the best way t o start is to say a little bit about what you did or work &ne here or even elsewhere that you think fits the topics that I’ve suggested for discussion. BALLOU: I started work here with General Electric in 1951 (January, 1951). I bas the laboratory assistant for.Roy Thanpson, and‘the & masis of our work then was tritium studies in small animals. that are used now in reference t o tritium, for example, uptake and clearance these hydrogen isotopes. Out of that cams m y of the numbers I had forgotten all about that tritium work. We work& with tritium and deuterium anu protium and the coqxa5son of inq with tritium we rapidly becarre involved with the fission pr ducts that were That was published in Journal of Biochemistry* in the 1950s. Efter workking released locally, e.g. ruthenium an% zinc-65 w h i c h were caning out of the BALLlxl: Ek t ahl is m studies. up with what was going on i n the plant. short-term studies with those m te rials. khat was the object of those studies, pri rar i ly metabolisn; ? We hadn’t sotten into any effects studies, a t that The mphasis wss primuily or? txying t o keep Pny incident that cane up we would begin STAEZNPFS: These were rzts? They were pr hz ril y rats and mice. At that th? I wasn‘t really interested

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m what I-qppn& t o the data. I wasn't involved too much im th-.=t,but Po? into management, and then b e c m involved in the transuranic work. d,ifferent areas kefore going t o Rochester. tinal &sorption of plutonium and papers with Maurice Sullivan an6 Roy Tharpson. I guess it was during that time thz'ewe ciid the first studies on absorption in I-EW born animals. A t least, that wds the first time that had been lkkec? a t with seen& to be permeable to a nuxtiber of materials in new h r n s . I qca2uzlly meed up i n the laboratoq7 as he rove5 up was this before you went t o Pschester? I work& about thirteen years in Frimaily mtabolism stu u es ir, I was involve2 with studies of intesWith ether materials, of couxse, it was well established t h a t the Ft been investigated with radionuclides. and of c m s e that work is still continuing in our laboratory. i n Eature, &d then later on in Health Physics. that it is very easy t o remember sane things aut what -le thatI knw have done but to Torget others. ir. without really l u - ~ m . ~ gthe background Mini them, like the studies with tungk for eI went t o Rochester. students, Steve Kaye, w z s wrkinu with tungsten. That opened a whole new box of questions, Fine re did mst of that get publish&? That would have been published - I think the first paper m y have been Do you have a bibliography that you could let m e have? I ' m fb ding -11, you knm- there were a n m h r of thinqs that \:e became w-volved I clidn't have my idea why we were working the tun9ste.n. Apparently it was added to s m bcmb test as a tracer for the fallout I guess I had carplet6 those studies jus tI found that out later. Then when I m s back in r;ochester one of the qraduate That was kind of irkerestin? that we had done that w x k a few years ezrlier.

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S.rzuam: I had forgotten that Steve ciid that. EKlLaJ: That was his 'thesis. A t the Univ.2t -ester I worked with thorium, thorium aide enriched with thorium-228, that ' s a tracer for follming hhzlation. the m t of work on thorium , it seems t o me, 1s mll relative toit ' s -possible PFI;LOU: I guess I've always felt it was hidsen un6er the raciiun story. Also, I guess we feel that those people represent a w e a l t h of information.on the long as I understand, follacJing them up agb. I am getting involved w i t h thorim through the uranium-232 decay chain. thorium-228 has ccme back again. "ne thorium story is smthinq Imuld like t o cane Lack t o because And do sk try. More recently nw, I ' m trying t o loak a t the dosimetry of the different daughter prcducts, and this is really acq lex system, and we are trying to unravel it using a pzmmium detector systa. . EXLtXXJ: Y e s . So the heel has kind of gone around. that appear along the way. just laked as thcrugh they dacided that they wen ' t going t o have a thoriuw m my general surveying of the field, there are sane peculiar blanks One of them was the thorium, U-232, U-233 story. It It w a s soing t o be plutonium, so there really wasn't very mch hark sone until the U-233 work. I cm't re(Tlember *ere else, Pat Durbin had a section in there, ani I think she had pretty mch drawn t q ether all that work on high specific activity uranium. There aren't very many p - m s on uranium-233, w d even fem on uranium-232. The thorium breeder work mat was done here, say in the 1960s I guess, just sort of dropped by the wayside. You find very little, unless there w a s work that It is in #e big boak on plutonium aki uranium [Hcdge, Stannard, & Hurshl. But we still have the people here, it's

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intsestin? that the people wfio were pioneer- in t h a t u e still here. Guys like E%smhho was r e d l y wrap@ up in that and is Still excited about thorium breeders. He's really been vzluable for roe. We do still have mterials here that were radiated y e a s back, and they still have waste mterials that came frm, a long-lived alpha emitter that i s in the waste materials frcm thorium breeder pocess a t levels about equivalent t o the plutonium-239 fran the uranium-plutonium ERLLCU: No, w e are j u s t naw doing that. That is merit work. I don't knew &iat the status of the thorium breeder is, but I have a $245,000 research program with those materials right nm. J?X,LCU: These are effect studies as well as metz blis rn. is very little that has been done with uranium-233, let alone uranium-232, so xe have to go back .ad lo& at rrr eta bol isn. The early work was mst ly with mtural uranium and 238. activity uranium isotopes, of course, it w i l l be radiological toxicity. me thing that m y be of hterest i s proactinium-231. That's I ' m beginning to get interested in practinium-231. These are effects studies now? As I phted out there where you have a metal toxicity. W i t h the high specific blismmay not be that similar. uranium rermins in the kidney. One thing I have been surprised a t is how little Of course it's highly mile. The early work shewed that it was so highly-toxic t o the kidney, maybe it doesnlt take much. mst of the uranium that I am mrking w i t h ends up in'the skeleton. 'Be major radiation hazzrd, it seems t o re, is t o the skeleton - or the lung, a t least in the skeleton rather than the kidney. I haven't rezlly looked at it that carefully yet.I ' m not really sure. That's all current and that got stimulated by the interest in the

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LX~muW:H i s t o , y kind of repea+& itself. hhat happer& in the interim. YOU came back here, and you fiidn't do mch mre as I recall w i t h what you had cione in Yes, that reslly grew o u t of my thesis work there at Rochester. YOU werk to other things. m a t was kind of interesting to E. One of the reasons I left t o go graduate school was thatI was being Sort Of directed into inhelation