Interview with Dick Foster

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- Add chapter on Whole Body Counter development? Use at Hanford to compare actual and predicted body burdens of Validated food chain predictions - Start of Fisheries program Lag between work on pile effluent and beginning operation of the - Prosser experiment with goldfish - fission products from Oak - Surprises in the results of river experiments Neutron activation products, not fission products Gross beta counts - Surprise #1 - fish from river much more radioactive than those in the laboratory Explanation: River fish were getting fed from natural sources; laboratory fish were getting uncontaminated food Surprise #2 - lab fish had mostly radioisotopes of Na and other Very little alpha the instrumentation missed the higher energy gammas - Concentration factor, concentration ratio

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Was very early in increasing concern over environment - Advisory Group to Hanford project - Development of limits on amounts of chemicals (Na dichromate) could be added to the river - Remember no general limits for population exposures at that time Concern for population exposure started with this work - Sampling programs for environmental media Two objectives : Possible effects of pile effluent Pathways for transfer of radioactive materials - Lab reports with P-32 to produce effects Geneva Conference reports - His personal history at l a b - Key labs in the field in his opinion

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Battelle Pacific hlh' Laboratories June 11, 1979 FcmER : Well, of course, I kncw the people here a t Hanford DO you know Mc-ll? for environmental mnitoring for cesium.] scxrebm- y like Earl Palmer here. Another would be Dick McCall. [S-wilking of sane of whole W y counters for FOSTER: He's no longer here. He's in Californie sawplace. But we were associated with the early developent of these instrrrments and then subsequently their actual field use for both w i t h the Eskimos and the cesium and also w i t h the some of the programs that were set up xound t h i s country t o follcw the cesium burdens i n people after the fallout fran tests. the man that was here originally but then set up with his trailers who now provides a service for all ...Helgeson, that ' s right. with doing whole-body counting work a t Bmkhaven and in taking the portable counters out t o the Pacific. FOSTER: All right. Yes.

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it in this chapter. But it my well be that Hmard Andrews knm enou5h They have a whole body counter a t hTH. If we could put I realize that I knm far too little about what was done about carting these things around and measuring people in various parts of the world. Maybe you ' r e going t o be able to - tell me a little bit about i t .7 FOSTER: Not a great deal.I think I was in that area because a t Hanford we did use them for a time when John Honstead was alive as apart of our overall environmental program. Not so much as a tool for determining what the existing burdens i n people were per se but more in the vein of how did the actual W y burdens, particularly of zinc-65 fran the Hanford pzoject here, square with w h a t we expected to be there on the basis of our dose prediction through food chains. was tied h with dietary surveys of local foods. I still .feel that some of the best information.available on populations tending to validate food chain predictions really came from Mnstead ' s work. He ended up counting literally thousands of school children here in Richland. And then we also used portable rigs to get these on local populations of fishermen. the people lived across the river inthe so-called Riverview area of Pasco, which is the damwind area, also an hig a tian area. also took these cim t o the mth of the Columbia River to the Gray% Harbor area and counted ,Deople in that reqion who w e r e

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thich described this. There were a couple of papers in Health Physics Unfortunately, a great deal of that turned cut t o be in ''gray" literature rather than i n terms of the full FOSTER: - Well, in a report,internal.In some of the proceedings of Symposia and other kinds of things. Would it be in that book on the Columbia River FOSTER: No, that doesn ' t have it. counties along the Columbia and some of the mistakes that were But I ' m going t o have a five foot shelf if I don ' t watch myself. Well, Dick, Idon ' t know i f you want t o start atthe beginning Sepur who a.rranged things with Donaldson and Art welander. I remember that book has the story of some of those That ought tobe worth describing. I had a wonderful time over at Seattle with Al Also Kenn it Larson cam in to talk abut the Nevada test site, and a fellow with him, a fellow whose name Ican ' t remember. how the onsite work here got started and tied in with the work over a t the Fisheries Lab. That's the one. I have a prettl- good feeljncj for But I'd really rzther hear frcm you how it I got the m res sion thzt Parker wi~sv q interested.

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W that even Staff Warren was interested i n there being suitable enviromn*l measurements very early. And that the effects of the p i l e effluents be masur& soon. And that you were tapped quite early atleast as second inline of an organization to g e t with it. And you %e been with it FOSTER : Well, there were rather parallel but inter tied programs which were start& a t the University of Washington started in abut 1943, I guess it would have been. Donaldson's book could clear that up. O f course, prior to that was the work which you already know much more about than I which was started by Stafford Warren and Simm G?ntril, Herb Parker, and that whole grcup prior to the construction or even sites election out here. Atthe time that the Hanford site was selected and the construction of the reactors began here, of course, the S h Cantril, Herb Parker, "Dag" N o m group came out and began their program for the radiological protection of the plant and environs. Close to that in tinre, scme of the same people i n c h f i g Staff Warren and Stone had concern for the fisheries out on the Columbia River. Consequently, they set up the work with Donaldson at the University. I was a charter member of the Donaldson group there originally. We, of course,were focusing just on the fish and dominantly on Fat ion which was, well, the first one would. kin the fall of Then as the reactors here were canpleted and began

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194b.But the third me was cq let ed early i n 1945. as re was a decision which was made again bythe Manhattan District including Shields Warren. I 'm quite sure Herb Parker and Simn mtril were in on tlus that the wrk ought t o include an onsite program on the toxicity, i f you will, of the,what we called, pile FOSTER: Staff.Staff Warren, yes. Since the fisheries work had originally begun witha small crew with Dxaldson's group at the University, [it was] felt it wauld be reasonable t o continue an arrangement with the University of Washington forgetting that portion of the work done. But the actual experimental work needed t o be done here in..a laboratory which would be set up specifically to use Columbia River water and the pile effluent. There was a decision then made that Foster, me, should move over here to Hanford. So I came over here.Started up actually on afull - time basis late or middle June of 1945. Because of logistics it was ezsier if I did not wrk for the University of Washington but rather was an employee of the contract or which was then DuDont cmy that prece6e-d General Electric coming in. Also for logistic purposes, Iwas assigned not instantly or a t the outset to the H. I. division that Herb Parker was running but rather to the production division because we were going t o be drawing on some of the operating force to provide the technician help for nm ning the laboratories.

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So when I first came over I was notat the oucset and for the 5 r s t year a menber of the Health Physics &.vision. We em&,fran a program planning pint of view, a close tie with Donaldson. And actually interchanged some of the fish that were being used inthe experimental area. We depended upon contacts over there in order to provide eggs t o be used, transported things back and forth, mintained programnatic area. When General Electric t w k over the following years (1946) ,there wasa good opportunity It was about this time.that Iiarry Kornberg also camz organizational arrangement. And Carl Gamertsfelder, a t that time, I was then reassigned to the H.I. group. Jack Healy was,of course,previously a member of that iz at ional titles, but at that particular pint,both Harry Kornberq and I reprted to Carl Gamertsfelder. Ranember when we gave that Synpsium in San Francisco on history of Health Physics, and you very kindly got me a picture of the old building with the Quonset hut near the pile,the troughs and pile effluent going through? When was that built ? Feb rua v and early March of 1945. construction people here (contractors for the reactors), the third and last one being 100F,were in the process of clearin9 out That original Quonset hut was built in about Asa matter of fact,the major

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frm their major construction job (caplet ion of 1OOF). A t that time the decision was made t o construct the h u m t for the aquatic biology bio test area. t o come back i n for a matter of a week or two t o throw up that original hutment. So the construction forces were asked with exposing fingerlings to pile effluent? STANNARD: Was that the beginning? FOSTER: That was the beginning. By this time though,you had already done experiments ' STANNARD: The piles had been wing a while? but you see the first reactor, which was E, started out in the I'm not sure t h a t I've set the right dates here, late fall of 1943. STANNARD: Yes,that ' s what I was thinking. FOSTER: Then theF area which was the third one of the group started up I think in either January o r February of 1945. It was about the same time that the F area pile started up that the construction people were clearing out. And then they came back in. Of course this was a small easy task for just a few guys t o in the lOOF area where the lahr a to q was built. The effluent fran that pile .was not available earlier than like about February of that So cur ex_Deriments were started with the pile effluent same year. So w e ' re talking about three or four months here. 7STANNARD: Meanwhile you had been doing field - type work.

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Eecause I remember s a w very old reports measurmg fission prducts FOSTER : That came later. STANNARD: 7Those came later.I ' v e got toget my dates squared FOSTER : There was one experiment with fish using fission products which had been run earlier. laboratory jar basis with goldfish back a t Argonne [Met. Lab]. That had been run i n a STANNARD: Yes,I keep 'running into that. That seems tobe the initiral number one fish experiment. FOSTER: With fission products. Of course,there had been prev i bus work that had been done with radium. natural ones prior t o that. C. Ladd Prosser and sane of his colleagues. But that first one was done by That was carried out, I think, in probably about 1943 or there abuts. i t had to wait for fission.products to come probably I ' m not sure Tibut the time of course butI think they came from Oak Ridge at that point. STANUARD : As the work progressed I got the impression from Herb Parker that you had some surprises as you went ahead. Firstly, the Chenical toxicity in the pile effluent certam* 1Y was much greater than the radiation problem. FOSTER: Yes. In this original hubnmt, we set up the eqerimental design in such a fashion that we could,in fact,separate out an effect; diat it was was due t o the chemicals which were being used in the mter trea-t process, whether it was heat w h i c h was alsa a possible significant factor or whether it was the radiation.

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It tune6 out to be, as far as an b i a t e observable effect cf those three things, this order: 1) chemical toxicity, and GR never did see an effect that we could i6en';ify as being associated with the radiation. 1 9 4 6 the follwinq year, b do a s m h a t better job on identifying the radioactive materials that we were actually dealing with But we did kegin, I thmk i n about both in the pile effluent water and in the fish which had been the pile effluent water w a s i n fact knm well ahead; it had been predicted ahead of the time by SORE of the W o n t people. I still think they did a remarkable job witha brand new process of predictinq w h a t was going to be there. Of course, these m e really not the fission products in any great abundmce at all, rather these were ~ e u t r o nactivation prcducts because The spectrum of radioactive materials i n the procedure was such that fission products were supposed t o stay within the slugs, .zs we called them,except for a few elements. And they pretty well did this. It turned out that there were mre fission pr ducts there than we had originally anticipated, not because of a failure in the uranium in Columbia the pile. And that River water which was caning through and going into natural uranium content in the Colmbia River water was supposed to behave a b i t differently - and it didn't - than that uranium which w a s inside of the slugs! as little uranium in it as m y river you could ask for. I was under the irpression that the Columbia ha2 about

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FuS i ER: Well,it ’ s low but not that low. need to appreciate in that those days the ability to make radiochemical analyses by elanent or nuclide w a s still i n its infancy. Back t o …