“I have seen the enemy and he is us.”
-Pogo

            From 1957 to 1966,  Virgil Stewart was Chief of Police of a force of one. He patrolled the largely crime-less area, writing parking tickets, giving warnings without tickets and breaking up occasional fights, which the local papers uniformly insisted on calling “melees.”   I don’t know why they couldn’t have varied their descriptions a little, maybe calling them “fights” or “slug-fests” or “brawls” but no.  “Melee” would have to do, as if other nouns would have been prohibitively expensive to print. 

            Virgil was also Assistant Fire Chief, as well as Ohio County Civil Defense Director.  Both of these were unpaid positions, but he worked them as jobs just the same.  This gave him something of a unique view of local issues, but he also understood, to a large extent,  the bigger picture.    Given the fact that he served at the height of the Cold War, he received a cache of government equipment, including geiger counters¹.   They were little yellow metal boxes, requiring four D batteries, equipped with a wand resembling a microphone.  They emitted an audible click each time they detected a radioactive substance.  

             On the North side of Beaver Dam at the intersection of  U.S. 62 and U.S. 231 there were three service stations, a motel and restaurant.  Highway 62 runs east to west; 231, north to south.²   Sheffield’s Restaurant was a popular place for travelers.  Its attached service station made it a great place for motorists to fill up their vehicles with cheap petroleum and their stomachs with delicious home-cooked food.  I spent a lot of time in that restaurant, with my family and friends, listening to their  juke box and eating my menu favorite, roast beef with potatoes and gravy.  The place smelled wonderful: a mix of coffee aroma and cooking food, a step or two above the typical aroma of a greasy spoon.  It would draw you in.  When my dad died in 1966, his friends from the round table in the back of Sheffield’s sent flowers to his funeral, signed, “The Coffee Drinkers.”

            For a variety of reasons, official and culinary, Virgil visited Sheffield’s corner several times daily.  He began to notice large flatbed trucks parking in the back of Sheffield’s lot.  Heavily chained to the middle of each flatbed  was a small metal barrel, dwarfed by the size of the trailer on which it rested.  It gave the impression that whatever was in the barrel was very dense and extremely heavy.   Otherwise, why would you need such a big rig to carry such a small barrel?   Of course, these contradictions raised Virgil’s suspicions. 

While the drivers were eating in Sheffield’s, Virgil could be found lurking outside, visually inspecting these large vehicles with their strange little cargoes.  At some time during one of his many inspections, he pulled out his Civil Defense geiger counter and pointed its microphone toward the barrel.  When he did so, the device went crazy, clicking so rapidly that it sounded like machine gun fire.  The trucks were hot!  The very radioactivity we feared from a nuclear attack at the hands of the Russians was riding around the highways of Kentucky and eating at Sheffield’s!  

            It was as if Barney Fife had come face to face with the Military-Industrial Complex. Virgil’s reaction to this alarming revelation was to find the truck driver, order him to leave town and take his hot mess with him.    He became vigilant about the existence of these trucks, sending them packing and saving the town from this unseen, potentially deadly contamination.  The drivers probably just ate their lunches in Central City or Leitchfield instead.  They did not, however, eat anywhere inside the city limits of Beaver Dam.

            In the decades that followed, long after Virgil’s death,  I continued to observe these big rigs with their teeny canisters.  They weren’t just in our neck of the woods, either.  I spotted the rigs on  I-65 and I-75, two major north-south routes in the state.  I knew that this nefarious cargo was a ticking time bomb, but I still didn’t know where the stuff was going.  I wondered if the general public was at all aware that the flat-bed truck they just passed in their 1980 Chevette was leaking radiation at high speed all over I-65.   

            It was not until 1999 that any facts became public that  would solve the mystery of the radioactive trucks.  It was then that the Washington Post published a series of articles, written by Joby Warrick, detailing the occupational exposure of workers to bomb-grade uranium at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a scant 102 miles west of Beaver Dam.  The Louisville Courier-Journal joined the Post and picked up the story.  Reporters James Carroll and James Malone wrote extensively on the issue.  

            The source of the glowing trucks that passed through Beaver Dam was the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, a scant 102 miles to the west of town.  In the month I was born, October 1950, the former Kentucky Ordnance Works near Paducah was selected by the Defense Department to produce enriched uranium fuels for “military reactors and nuclear weapons.”  It was a part of the Manhattan Project, a top-secret pre-World War II endeavor begun by FDR in 1939 at the urging of Albert Einstein.  It was then that Einstein warned Roosevelt that the Germans were working on a nuclear fission project that could produce “extremely powerful bombs.”  He urged FDR to do likewise.  FDR’s subsequent directive launched the Manhattan Project, which ultimately made the U.S. the only country to produce a working nuclear bomb during World War II. 

            The heart of the Manhattan Project was at Oak Ridge, a place in the bucolic  mountains of  eastern Tennessee that you will pass en route to the less radioactive environs of the area:  Knoxville,  Gatlinburg, the Great Smoky Mountains and Dollywood.³  Oak Ridge was the location of the first uranium enrichment plant,  built by the Kellex Corporation in 1943.  The project was code named “K-25," a combination of K for Kellex and 25, the Project code for uranium-235.  Uranium 235 is “fissile,” meaning that its atoms can be split to release energy so massive that the bombs it powers are measured in megatons and kilotons of  TNT.   K-25 served as a prototype for both the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant and its sister operation,  the Portsmouth (Ohio) Gaseous Diffusion Plant, opened four years later,  which is actually located just north of there in Piketon, Ohio.     The Paducah plant went on line in 1952 and employed  a “gaseous diffusion” process to “enrich” uranium, by separating the fissile U-235 from non-fissile U-238.    Beginning in 1956, the partially-processed, enriched uranium was then trucked from Paducah to the Portsmouth plant, where the enrichment process was continued.  The product was enriched U-235, which could be put to various military uses, including nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs, just like the one the Russians were threatening to use to blow us to smithereens.   Bomb-grade enriched uranium was passing through Beaver Dam and every other city, town and wide spot fronting U.S. 62 from Paducah to Piketon. 

            As far as I know,  none of these trucks was ever involved in an accident.  Still, it is hard  not to wonder what environmental and human catastrophe might have taken place had someone like Grandma Morrison pulled her stubby little ‘53 Ford out in front of a radioactive rig in downtown Beaver Dam. Armageddon on North Main Street?

            For an economically depressed area like Paducah, the PGDP was a godsend.  The 1,200+ jobs the plant created produced revenue that made Paducah a boom town.⁴  It was said that the brothels in Paducah put in extra wings to accommodate the desires of those workers whose pockets were suddenly flush with cash.

            Although the plant was and is owned by the Defense Department, it was run by Union Carbide Corporation until 1984, in a kind of joint venture between the two.   The risk of radioactive contamination was consistently understated to workers, who were simultaneously told how important their efforts were to the national defense.   This minimization of risks came from the top down.  Edward Teller, head of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Reactor Safeguards Committee, specifically cautioned that, “ . . .safety regulations must not stand in the way of rapid development of nuclear power.”  It was the Cold War.   Fear of “godless commies” permeated the political landscape.   I remember my mother referring to Russia as a “snake in the grass” although her vivid metaphor was lost on me at the time.   By 1962, they were building missiles in Cuba.  Those things were pointed at us!  The nation was tense.  When would the shoe drop?

            So it did not seem to matter much, at least not to the Defense Department, that their own workers in Paducah would be sickened, the groundwater and aquifers contaminated, the earth poisoned and the air infused with radioactive dust by the activities carried on at the plant.   Some workers even volunteered for experiments that involved breathing radioactive gas, drinking radioactive liquids and eating radioactive “salt.”   And since secrecy was one of the hallmarks of nuclear defense technology, the DOD and Union Carbide felt no need to explain.  To anyone.  Workers were just a tiny cog in a huge wheel that they could not even see, much less evaluate.

            The health and safety procedures at PGDP were described by Thomas Cochran, a nuclear expert with the NDRC, as the “worst outside the former Soviet Union.”   In a not surprising, but rather sickening allegation in a worker lawsuit against the company, some members of a work team on a radioactive site failed their training because they were functionally illiterate and could not read posted hazard signs.   In the evermore-glowing Bluegrass State, ignorance was bliss.

            The public was not informed.  According to government documents, liquid waste was dumped into ditches, ponds and streams, with subsequent flow into the Big and Little Bayou creeks, ultimately reaching the Ohio River.  The contaminants spread extensively through the ecosystem.  Half of raccoons near the plant were found to have “above normal radiation emissions.”  Workers at the plant developed leukemia and various rare cancers.  Studies conducted long after the spate of law suits against the plant’s operators, however,  found no accelerated rate of cancer in workers at the plant. I do not believe the late studies reflect reality, because they were conducted long after Union Carbide quit managing the plant.   Employees were falsely told that radioactive material was safe enough to eat!  The cafeteria was contaminated.  The equipment, even office equipment,  was contaminated.  Many employees were already dead.  You really can’t dig up whole cemeteries looking for evidence.  Statutes of limitation run out eventually.  As it was with Uncle Vivian’s murder, some wrongs are simply  never righted.  

            The PGDP is now an EPA Superfund clean up site.  The clean up includes “ground water, liquid waste, sediment and soil” and is scheduled to continue until 2040, but full clean up activities are expected to take longer.  The  plant is scheduled to be “decontaminated and decommissioned” for sale to a private entity by the Department of Energy in 2013.

            Obviously, the public was never warned that hot radioactive materials were rolling down Main Street daily and following you on your trip up U.S. 62 to Rosine. 

            The irony of this situation is glaring.  In the Cold War, the country worried constantly about being vaporized by nuclear weapons at the hands of the Soviet Union, effectively destroying, or at least poisoning, the world forever.  It was commonly believed that a “first strike” would set off an exchange of nuclear gunfire that would incinerate our beautiful blue planet and all life along with it.  This was the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD.  There has never been a more accurate acronym.   Simply put, the world was freaked out. 

            In the process of protecting ourselves from the real and perceived actions of foreign governments, we endangered the traveling public, poisoned ourselves and our own land, water and air, created a mess that will take approximately 100 years to clean up and will never completely leave the landscape.   The half life of U-235 is 700 million years, or approximately 35 million future generations of Kentuckians.  It really should never have happened, but the products of fear can be very long lasting.