A Brief History
On May 17, 1983, the US government was obligated to release information due to a newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act request about the largest Mercury pollution source in history, the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, nuclear facilities first constructed during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.
Digging Deeper
The site of the second self-sustaining atomic pile reactor in the world, Plutonium was produced there from Uranium to make atom bombs. From 1950 to 1963, 11 million kilos of Mercury were used for isotope separation, and over a million kilos of Mercury was released into the atmosphere, into the soil, into the rock, and into the local creek.
The Oak Ridge nuclear related pollution joins Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in the “Nuclear Hall of Shame,” and we wonder about the environmental disasters that are still secret or still to come.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Liernan, Denise. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. Atria Books, 2014.
Tamplin, Arthur and John Gofman. Population control through nuclear pollution. Nelson-Hall Co, 1970.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Brian Stansberry, of marchers displaying a banner during the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance rally at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
