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Growing Up Nuclear: Author Kelly McMasters Tells Her Story

The following is a guest blog post by Kelly McMasters, author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town. The book, which hits stores this week, recounts McMasters' childhood in the beautiful town of Shirley, bucolic home to nuclear power plants and, later, to cancer clusters and polluted waterways.

I grew up in a blue-collar town on the east end of Long Island. Just north of the town, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a federal nuclear facility, sits deep within a thick forest of towering pine trees. As a child, I imagined the lab’s buildings were made of an igloo-like substance, and the rooms inside were full of metallic file cabinets, clinking glass test tubes, and notebooks full of secret codes. Men and women in crisp white lab coats and plastic goggles coaxed new species of frogs and lizards out of mottled purple eggs. Others hovered over milky glass globes of light whose kinked antennas sparked blue shots of electricity into the dim, silent air. My neighbor worked as a maintenance man at the lab, and he often teased that he glowed in the dark. After he died of brain and lung cancer, my imaginary lab became a much darker place—a small, sinister pocket hiding in the pines.

The lab—which the kids knew had something to do with nuclear reactors, although we weren’t quite sure what that meant—existed mainly in our minds because of the thick forest of towering pine trees surrounding it. The Long Island Pine Barrens envelops the 5,300-acre Brookhaven Laboratory property, acting as a barrier and isolating the lab from the rest of Long Island. Old military-style gates from its days as Camp Upton, an army induction center active during the world wars, keep everyone but those with official business out.

Unfortunately, since Long Island is basically a jumbo sand bar, the natural barriers—the air and soil and water table—are harder to control. A Superfund site since 1989, with soil and drinking water contaminated with Cesium 137, Plutonium 239, Radium 226, and Europium 154, as well as underground plumes of tritium stretching out towards my town, the lab sits on top of one of the largest sole-source drinking water aquifers in the country, serving more than 3 million people on the island.

The waste came from accidents, spills, and irresponsible practices over the course of 50 years. In 1960, nuclear waste from the first of three nuclear reactors was accidentally pumped into a drinking water well instead of the ﬁll pipe of an underground holding tank. During some experiments to produce neutrons, the reactor also leaked radioactive slurry into the soil and groundwater. The reactor, aging and unreliable, was shut down in 1968. Leftover radioactive material from the reactor was sealed in the boxy building. Seventy layers of contaminated graphite blocks are contained in a cube measuring twenty-ﬁve feet on each side. It would take 300,000 years for the radioactive material to reach levels safe enough for human interaction. That’s longer than Long Island itself has even existed.

In 1960, meanwhile, Shirley was the fastest-growing community in Suffolk County—the year-round population of the town more than doubled in the short span of ten years. The Atomic Energy Commission and the scientists themselves could have taken a look around and realized they were no longer on their own in the middle of the wilderness. A few hundred feet beyond the military-style gates of the 5,000-acre compound, newly arrived families were raking leaves, washing cars, tending vegetable gardens. Once the first reactor had cracked open and leaked, and once that reactor had been decommissioned, the officials could have looked back at their founding documents and reminded themselves that they were originally intended to operate ten miles away from any populous area. They could have packed up, or they could have recognized that the homes and neighborhoods sprouting up around their compound were too close to chance the radioactive nature of the work they were conducting and continued with only the non-nuclear experiments. But none of this happened.

I visited the laboratory two summers ago. After a half-day tour of the campus, I looked around the antiseptic lobby at the visiting children twittering around happily, toting their new Brookhaven National Laboratory coloring books and candy-colored helium balloons printed with that Jetsonish atomic swirl symbol. Our group dispersed, and we walked out of the main building, which released us with the whispered whoosh of pneumatic doors. There was an ice cream truck parked next to the building, and an overweight bus driver on his break leaned against his yellow charge, a cigarette in one hand and a soft-serve cone in the other. A line of people stood in front of the ice cream truck, its off-key plinking echoing into the parking lot, and I shivered in the August heat. The blue of the sky was sharp against the scattering of ash-colored buildings. Above the tops of the trees, I could see the slender tips of the decommissioned reactors’ smokestacks. They were sand-colored, and the bright red stripes that circled their tips looked like strings tied around someone’s ﬁngers, reminding them of something they otherwise would have forgotten.

Comments

Brookhaven National Labs is a government-owned research facility established shortly after WWII and operated for most of its history by nine NE universities.

Contrary to this blog’s intro, there are no nuclear power plants at Brookhaven. There are three research reactors, the last of which was shut down in 2000, that were used for reactor metals and medical radioisotope research. In fact, Technicium 99m, the commonly used radioisotope for heart exams, was developed here. Another error the author makes is her description of “smokestacks.” Those may look like smokestacks, but as most people know, reactors do not put out smoke. Little errors like this show a general lack of knowledge and research on the part of a writer.

Without benefit of the entire book, one can guess where the author is going – a sad story of an irresponsible nuclear neighbor poisoning and killing the innocents. This is a common theme preached by the anti-nuclear crowd, who often mixes nuclear power and weapons together in order to stir the emotions of an already emotional group.

Some very quick online research will provide the truth seeker with two documents published in the late 1990s as a result of claims made by locals that Brookhaven was giving them cancer. Both reports, researched and authored by independent panels, said the following:

“The conclusions of the epidemiologic cancer study are that … (1) cancer rates of all types of cancers studied are not elevated near BNL and (2) there is no evidence that rates among the four sectors are significantly different from each other or are correlated with underground plume or wind directions. Also, there is no evidence that childhood rhabdomyosarcoma incidence is elevated in Suffolk County or in the circle encompassing BNL during the study period 1979-93…”

A second report looked at BNL employees, about 3000 people. Lead by Maria Schymura, Ph. D., Director, New York State Cancer Registry, New York Department of Health, the results were:

“…the overall distribution of cancers in this cohort did not deviate significantly from expected. Of particular note, radiosensitive solid cancers were not proportionately elevated.”

Clearly, independent review has determined no evidence exists to suggest activities at BNL resulted in health issues among either the BNL employees or locals within the 15 mile study area.

Sadly, the author recounts the story of her neighbor who worked at BNL and died from lung and brain cancer as if the two were tied together. My mother passed away in February of lung and brain cancer. She never lived within 500 miles of a nuclear reactor of any kind. However, I wonder if Ms. McMaster’s neighbor was, like my mother, a life-long smoker?

Posted by: Barry Wallace on 04/27/08 at 12:36 PM Respond

The apologists for nuclear (fill in the blank: power, weapons, testing, industry, etc) jump immediately to discredit Kelly's story. Radiation is dangerous, period. The citizens of the USA have been sold down the river when it comes to being told that this stuff is safe.

Posted by: No Nukes on 04/30/08 at 5:33 AM Respond

Radiation is NOT dangerous, period. Every person on Earth is exposed to natural radiation on a daily basis and our species somehow thrives.

I am afraid that many well-meaning people who respect the environment have been taken for a ride (sold) down the river by those who stand to gain from protecting you from the Boogey Man de jour.

Kelly's story is accurate from her perception. Implying or stating that mortality rates are increased around Brookhaven National Labs due to radiation exposure or ingestion is false.

Acute exposure to high levels of radiation will kill within minutes. Chronic exposure, i.e., over time, to elevated levels of radiation can lead to elevated cancer rates and increased mortality rates. For example, radon gas, commonly found in the basements of New England homes can increase mortality rates.

Those of us in the nuclear industry take radiation very seriously and go to great lengths to keep worker exposure as low as possible. That is why every credible long term study of nuclear workers has found no increase in cancer related diseases or mortality.

What "apologists" like me do is confront unsubstantiated statements, gross exaggerations, and lies - with facts. After that, it's up to you to determine your perceptive reality.

I do so professionally, respectfully, and in the spirit of learning.

Posted by: Barry Wallace on 04/30/08 at 7:15 AM Respond

No Nukes

In the spirit of learning, I would like to know the sources of your information, if any, for your conclusions. I provided my sources yet you spout off.

I find that people like yourself can only offer speaking points I hear repeatedly that are exaggerated, disingenuous, and designed to elicit emotional attachment.

I am more than willing to have a dialogue based upon reality, which includes scientific research and basis. So far, no one has really stepped up to do so. Perhaps you would like to do that.

Posted by: Barry Wallace on 05/03/08 at 11:27 AM Respond

Kelly, No Nukes, et al.

I am disappointed none of you have responded to my postings. Anyone can (and do) write anything they feel on a blog, accurate or not.

I do my best to learn from others when they can support what they are saying with rational thought and/or facts.

I cannot learn from emotional outburts or stories not supported by truth.

So if your objective is not to help me and others learn, is your motive monetary? or perhaps pyschological release? or egotistical?

Posted by: Barry Wallace on 05/09/08 at 1:24 PM Respond