Hanford is located in Benton County
(mostly) and the Columbia River forms a boundary . That strech of the
Columbia is in fact called the Hanford Reach. Parts of Walla Walla and
Yakima Counties are located in pretty much the same general air basin as
Hanford, though there is a low mountain range (Gable Mountain) that is
east of where the emissions were (between Yakima County and the emissions.
Toppenish is the headquarters of the Yakima Indian Nation, and is on the other
side of Toppneish ridge from the Hanford air basin.
Okanagan and Ferry
Counties are pretty far north of Hanford and not really in the same air basin,
but milk from cows that grazed in the Columbia Valley was distributed in those
counties as well as other, more distant ones.
Plenty of people live
there (and lived there during WWII). At one time, the site employed, I
believe, more than 30,000 people. Today, the Tri-Cities (Pasco, Kennewick,
Richland) are the third largest population centers in Washington (after Seattle
and Tacoma) Hanford is essentially Richland.
The Columbia River
Valley in southern Washington is a very productive agricultural area (e.g.,
apples, cherries, grapes, the Ste. Michelle winery). It's dry, but hardly
as dry as Albuquerque, where I live.
The results of the study are not at
all surprising. However, you should also know that goiter (thyroid
hypertrophy) was common in eastern Washington before WWII because of a relative
lack of iodine in the diet -- iodized salt became ubiquitously available only
after WWII -- and had nothing whatever to do with Hanford.
Ruth Weiner, Ph. D.
ruthweiner@aol.com
==========================
The Hanford Reservation used to include cross-river buffer areas in Adams
and Franklin counties, but they were released one or two decades
ago. The Hanford Reach is the only
free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River left, not counting the headwaters in
British Columbia or the estuary, below the Columbia Gorge near Portland.
Yakima County is not in the same air basin as Hanford. It is separated by
both physical barriers and wind patterns. The Toppenish Ridge runs
lengthwise (generally East-West) in the Yakima Valley and separates the southern
portions of the Yakama Indian Reservation from the northern portions. The
Yakama Nation changed the spelling of the tribe's name a few years
ago.
Gable
Mountain and Gable Butte (with a pass in between) run East-West and sit to the
north of the chemical processing areas on the Hanford central plateau that were
the source of the iodine and other emission, mainly during the mid- and
late-40s. They separate the central plateau from the reactor sites along
the river.
One
fact, little remarked. Roughly 90% of the iodine releases occurred in
1944-46, when there was one or two operating reactors. Around '46 or '47,
silver filters were installed at the processing facilities and iodine emissions
dropped precipitously. Five years later, when there were around a half
dozen reactors operating, emissions were only 5-10% of their peak in the mid-40s
and continued to drop. Installation of the silver filters came during a
time of highest secrecy and was clearly not a response to public pressure, a
fact of potential interest when DOE and Hanford contractors are being sued by
downwinders for bad-faith operation leading to exposure of the downwinders to
iodine and other radionuclides.
I
doubt that Okanogan and Ferry counties were a market for Hanford area milk in
the 40s and 50s, but don't have any data on that. Such data might be found
in the HTDS Final Report, which is supposed to be available on the CDC website
now.
If you
count Seattle-Tacoma as one urban area, then the Tri-Cities is the state's third
largest after Sea-Tac and Spokane. At the peak of construction of the
Hanford Site in 1943-45. Camp Hanford had a population of 55,000 and was the
third or fourth largest "city" in the state. Current population of the
Tri-Cities Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area is on the order of
200,000.
According to the Hanford Met Station and data from
Oregon State University, all of the Columbia Basin in south central Washington
has less than 10 inches of rain a year, equal to the drier parts of Albuquerque
and less than the eastern highlands of the city. The Yakima and Columbia
Valleys are a richly productive agricultural area, wherever you irrigate.
The only unirrigated agriculture is dryland wheat farming, generally with one
crop of wheat grown using two years worth of moisture, and dryland
grazing.
I
asked Dr. Tom Hamilton, the HTDS thyroid disease specialist, whether they had
looked at iodine deficiency as a confounder. He said they had looked at it
fairly carefully, including reviewing a early 1940s study of the state that
showed an essentially homogeneous distribution of suffient dietary iodine around
the state. He attributed the elimination of the early 1900s "goiter belt"
in eastern Washington to the introduction in the 20s and 30s of iodized salt and
the use of iodine as an anti-spoilage agent in bread.
Best
regards.
Jim
Dukelow
Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory
Richland, WA
jim.dukelow@pnl.gov