Interview with Harry Jordan

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- "Upshot Knothole'' in 1953 was his first involvement with the - He really got involved f o r "Project 5 6 " - the first Pu safety shot - this was re/safety of weapons during storage and shipment Bill Johnson had a lot to do with Project 56 and its reports - Project 56 - 4 shots in Area 11 - no animals involved but health and safety considerations were involved - While the project remained classified most of the information got used for soil standards, etc. - Looking at resuspension of Pu at the shot sites - British work and concepts of resuspension - Re/Expressing activity in units of per square area versus activity per gram question of the change, at NTS, at least - Origin of 100 u gm PU per square meter for military - 1000 u g m per square meter is Sandia's number (He said for permanent occupancy. This is not my impression, N.S.) Los Alamos sticks with 100 u gm per square meter and he considers even that is - British made best contribution to Roller Coaster (in his view) in

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terms of writing it u p - What was limit used at Palomares? - did not know - Not very impressed by modeling - Off the record on what contour levels of Pu the military now uses Trinity shot - Best plot would be the one by Kermit Larson Fallout was in people's minds before Trinity, - He feels very comfortable with the numbers that came out of - Were health precautions adequate at the tests? Yes, they were. Kudos for Al Graves and other Los Alamos people connected with the - The problem of multiplying small doses by large populations - Sketch of Al Graves'personality and dedication The United Church in Los Alamos - Internal emitter exposures at tests, documentation of General documentation of exposures - spot checks Dilemma of badging everybody everywhere Film badge processing is (or was) difficult and expensive - The accident record at test site was comparable to construction - Al Graves was exposed in the early criticality incident at L o s - Enhanced his reasons for concern about people "being hurt in this

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Plutonium area contamination More on Test Group 56 Development nf soil standards General philosophy of test program, anecdotal about A1 Graves

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STANNARD : Harry, Idon ' t know i f you know what the primary pur3ose of my visit is besides seeing the place after so long.It may be a good idea i f you could just give me a little capsule,for the record, of which activities you are associated with and how the Los Alamos group pir tic ipa ted because alot of that was classified fora long time. This will not be a classified volume, butit can use classified - data and then put it through and see that it is declassifiec?. Fortunately I still have the Qc lea rence. JORDAN: My involvement with the test site started in "upshot Knothole" i n 1953. I guess t h e primary work t h a t you may be concerned about was so-called "Project 5 6 " , which was organized because of the concern with the optimized weapon. People worried that in shipping these weapons that they could go accidentally - you could finda stray neutron, or one accidental detonator coulci go, and it would go nuclezr in IChicago railroad yards o r sanething. blank because there wasn't nearly as mc'l written *ut it. JORDAN: Well, there was a series of reports put out by Bill Johnson. He wrote up. Project 56. I t bas been classified for a long time, but most of that information and data has not been pulled out as a unit,unc lz ssi fie. mst of it has been pull& out and used in court cases and used in deliberations of what the standards arein tamination on soil was a paper by Wright Langham, Payne Harris and Ernie Anderson. %eY put out a cl as if i ed report on safety of our we a pns systems, and what would I wound UD as bianedical director for Task Group57. 56 is kin3 of a Atthe time the only guidance that people had on plutonium consivel (or -hie with HE) ad result in the spread of plutonium.

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We conducted four different shots at area 11 atthe test site. They were i n differen: configurations and oi ffe rent avenues of dispersal. One I can recall wzs totally enclosed ina iarninzted 2x4 ' s outhouse sort of thins. allow a e 2 x 4 t*s to collect the radiochemistry separately for determination of [--?I. me thing to stress on this,Iqess,as that the whole thrust of Project 56 was for the weapons designers to m up with the parameters that would indicate khat they had to do to make the weapons safe frcm a one-pint detonation. and safety work was sort of an add-on that each division itself certainly ought t o W e ha2 no animal experimentation i n Project 56. designated array of where i t was supposed t o go. The purpose wzsto W e put out sticky fallout trays, we had air samplers, we had a large array. It was all just air sampling in the One of the shots went, with scrne ap9reciable yield (nuclew yield), scrnething like activity per unit area, which isa much more meaningfu have in the way o f contamination. You do have t o spec now to activity per q a m of &s+mce. As this wrk went on - and as other work has or 1019* fissions being a KT, i f you recall). So we had a small Out of that and out of the deliberations of Harris and bigh tnuclear incident. Langham and Ernie Anderson,we went back to visit those sites to do the resuspension of the concentration ; 2ndin those days - because I was from the industrial hygiene field,andI was sort of advising Payne Harris on this - we talked in terms o f We took the documented array - took the numbers that were representative term interns of what do you fyto what depth you have gone on - the term is turnin? abut the health effect,it is almost, t o me, a meaningless number. The people in Eng1and.that did the original work on resuspension, i n bomb craters for instance(they were worried about them; they did work with iodine),they talked of contamination per unit area because the thrust was towards what the health problem wss. problern,I believe in the ratio that says you have so much beneath an area,andif If you talk in terms of the health

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you have aceAM .m unt of activity (+beB rit ish classify the different klnds of activity), then you get this conversion factor of so much activity per unit volume in the year.It was sort of a standard wsy of thinking. The work that led to a large area of documentation(some of that work atthe test site that we were reviewing)started piling up samples for the chemist,andI think it just got to be a damn convenience - of people aoc u men ting areas to go t o STANNARD: It sounds very reasonable. back and we did what we called maximum re suspension. That meant that we lined up an array of high - volume air samplers along a stretch of terrain that had a documented level of plutonium per unit area,and we would stall out trucks,in the sense xh at we would just dig them into the ground and go across a small stretch of air with the maximum disturbance of the surface with rubber - tired in the avzilability of the plutonium for resuspensior,. Wright Langham came up with this so-called half-life of plutonium in the soil, which everybody had made funGf. Yes, I think that ' s why it happened.As a result of that work,we went We did immediate sampling. We did that on three different occasions,and there was apparently a decl ine mat ' s where Payne Harris and I think Healy is probably one of the strongest critics it went, we just tell you it became less mailable." orit.did something that we don ' t understand,but there is no question,in my mind anyway,that ss a result of weathering out there in the desert (that ' s a specific, perhaps not unique,but it is a specified area and climatic condition)but there is no westion that a t the Nevada Test Site the avxilzbility of that plutonium for re suspension declined with time. In ever understood why it wasn ' ta perfectly good concept. Well - we got around that argument by saying, " W e don't have to tell you where Either it got tied up chemically When we first went out(Ican ' t recall these numbers

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very well ) something 1 ike cperation pius 90 days, cx ut three months. Then we went out in ayear,and then in a year and a half. The same technique, the same people and the same concerns and the same way of looking atit,an dId on ' t believe there were any fundamental faults in the technique that could account for this Z-ent decrease. I think there i s sanething going on i? the a+ng ani the reaction to the climate. We tried the resuspension the same identical way - maximum disturbance of a n area - because at that time we knew the activity was still up in the surface, although a t the year anda half there was evidence that it had migrated down. I n any case,we took that number (you would have t o look this up)and Langham and Harris and Anderson assigned some decay factor, of course, very much higher than plutonium decay. I believe Iam correct in that they said this was the "availability factor" with aging. Therefore, they did this extrapolation over time for sc~neinhabitation of this l a d - (fifty years, I think it was) and they shmed where the lung dose was aperative (=controlling)and then where the bone dose toak effect. They did this assuming s a kind of (not maximum, but cert khl lr not nininnrm either) resuspension of a l l this activity, and they cams up (as I recall) with 100 micrograms per squzre meter as the allmmble limit. '&et wzs the nmkr that c e out of that effort as advice to the milit aq. Then, if you recall, (I always thought consi6erably less rational and! not as caref u l work) Project 57 cam2 out w i t h a nurdxx like 1000 and left it kind of hmqing. you rermnker those reports (SanGia reprts), they had a 1000 micrcgrams per quire meter. appreciable length of t.ixe? JOEUXN: One hundred was Wight Langham's m d Payne Harris' nuirker (LASL nmter) and 1000 cam? out of Sandiz, and Project Rollercozster (which ac@n was not written up very %,zt was su_apos& to be the rmximnn permissible line not t o m s s for any L e t r e just be blunt about it. Sandia did less t!!m adequate writing up of their If they found conflicting da+a - they found datz they didn't Like or

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or somethins; the best effort to write itup came out of the British because the Eri tish participated i n Rollercoaster. co~mu3n+& on the ailwabie l i f e t m surface contarmnation of 1000 micrograms. We never used itin our analysis.At LASL,we always used 100 and recommended that. One hunared seems outrageously high now. JORDAN: Oh,yes. They have the NESTE now. STANNARD: Are you a member of it still ? area between those t i n e s we z e speaking of and what they are doing nm. JORDAN: Well, the only thing you could really go back and look a t is Palcmares. Of \ Project Rollercoaster Cie not chanqe Sandia's I 1 suppse the Broken Arrm organization still exists. Ib you kncw what t h e y would use as a standard? There is a whole big blank Ic ourse,that ' s politically sensitive because we left a great deal more a t Palcmares than what any o f our people today would recommend for America, - ? h i s is my own opinion; that area was under the control of the Norwegians. being now later in tjme md.seat mre sensitized and perhaps mre people in the biological aspect, they irrrposed a sanewfiat stricter standard. But eve? there I suppose i t would be highly questionable if you could leave that kind of contamination anywhere i n America, other than perhaps atthe Test Site itself. STANNARD: Otherwise the roof would fallin. and I ' ve told &ck Healy this, people are not highly influenced by evidence or by conservative asscnnptiolls in mxielinq- We got carried away, totally,with all the modeling and what kind of conservative assumption - and putit on the compcter - and now you've got a lifetime dose. have modeling,and a lifetime dose has nothing iodo with anything you see in I ' m sure it would,and there would be alot of discussion.In my own view, They become highly influenced by what is politically acceptable i n I ' VE said to Jack many times the fact that you now In other words, Jack ' s modeling could never be duplicated in any of the

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s m ~ hp ~ i e .mey will continue to live there in that environment. You look ijt the modeling and you look at the Spanish people. the fact that the ' 56work was done primarily to alter weapons design be c class ' fied JORDAN. No, 2don ' t think so. Not i n my view.1think you could say that certainly Project 56 was designed to produce data that would enable the designers to produce a one point safe bomb and know what the parameters are that go into that. STANNARD: We never used the word in the 50s. STWNMU): The other point w a s that the military had a set of criteria that they m u l d use in case of a "Broken Arrow" incident, and they =re 1000, 100, and 10 [ug/m2] w i t h The last I saw of them they were in a set of regulations, but I haven't seen a recent set or had much contact with it to know whether it still e x i s t s or i f the military even has it any mre. There area couple of questions I would like to ask before I forget. Would I guess the fact that there is a one point problem is certainly not No, that's true, but it's 2i cmn, accepted fact now what those tests were for. different lengths of occupancy allwed at these various levels. Maybe you better turn that off because I don't knm if this is cl as if i ed or not. us …