The dirty history of nuclear power.

The Sequoyah Fuels plant looked like an ordinary factory on the Oklahoma prairie. But it processed radioactive uranium with little regard for its workers or the environment. Until local Cherokee people took on the giants of the nuclear industry - and won.

The date is January 4, 1986. The scene is the Sequoyah Fuels Plant at Gore, Oklahoma near the confluence of the Illinois and Arkansas Rivers, 75 miles southeast of Tulsa. At approximately 11:30 A.M. an over-filled cylinder of uranium fluoride gas being heated in steam chest suddenly ruptures, sending a cloud of toxic smoke boiling into the air. James Neil Harrison, age 26, standing 20 feet above the cylinder, is enveloped by the hissing cloud. His lungs fill with fluid; he gasps frantically for air. No emergency supply of oxygen is on hand, so fellow workers race eight miles to a nursing home in the town of Vian for a canister. Many critical minutes after the eruption, with oxygen finally being administered, Harrison is loaded into a car and taken 11 miles to a hospital in Salisaw. Unfortunately Kerr McGee (KM), the plant's owners, never had a contingency plan, so the hospital is unequipped to handle Harrison. The stricken man is driven another 10 miles to Sparks regional medical center in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Soon after he arrives, as doctors work over him, James Harrison, half African-American, half Cherokee Indian, nicknamed "Chief" by his fellow workers, is pronounced dead.

Roberts S. Keer, first as governor of Oklahoma and then as U.S. Senator, provided key political connections in the 1950s and 60s that enabled KM to become the largest uranium producer in the country by 1970. With yearly revenues of over $3.5 billion, KM was one of the nation's major energy conglomerates, heavily involved in oil drilling, coal mining, chemical production and timber cutting. Historically, the company's regard for worker safety ranked far down the priority list. Indian uranium miners on the Navajo Reservation in the 1950s - non-unionized and earning $1.60 an hour - were not told that their work could cause lung cancer. In 1974, Karen Silkwood, a worker at a KM nuclear fuel rods facility near Crescent, Oklahoma, died under mysterious circumstances while driving to deliver evidence of KM safety violations to a New York Times reporter. Her story became a Hollywood movie, but at first James Harrison's death hardly seemed to attract notice.

Officials at Sequoyah Fuels and KM headquarters in Oklahoma City attempted to blame the workers. Richard Pereles, director of corporate communications, told the press that the procedures used by the workers at the time of the lethal release were contrary to company guidelines. James Everett of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), in a statement printed in The New York Times, described the safety concerns as "minimal" since "only one person... had been killed."

The workers replied that they had permission from their shift supervisor to heat the overloaded cylinder. A maintenance mechanic, who worked at the plant for 11 years, added that this procedure was frequently used. But it wasn't easy for the workers to voice their complaints. The plant was the biggest employer in the region, the primary meal ticket for hundreds of families. Moreover, the workers had no union, since KM was notoriously hostile to labor organizations.

An embarrassing string of accidents dating to the plant's opening in 1970 now came to light: uranium spills, airborne discharges, excessive disposal of contaminated material into wells underlying the plant. The rumble of protest swelled in volume, tentatively among the workers, louder out in the community. Gradually, it became apparent that, in the heart of eastern Oklahoma, at the confluence of two important rivers, among land that originally had been set aside for displaced Cherokee Indians from Georgia and the Carolinas, a highly toxic industry was operating without proper surveillance or controls.

When Jessie Deer-in-Water, a beautician working in Vian, heard that Sequoyah Fuels had applied for a permit to increase the amount of waste they were already injecting into their wells, she stood up at a public hearing to request that the permit be denied. After she gathered 1,000 signatures on petitions from a populations of 1,500, Sequoyah Fuels woke up to the fact that a most determined individual was beginning to make a racket outside the factory gates. The company turned on the heat; convenience stores carrying Jesse's literature and pamphlets were forced to pull them.

In 1985, Jessie Deer-in-Water founded Native Americans for a Clean Environment (NACE) with 11 other core members. Wilma Mankiller, who later became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, helped Jessie obtain funding. The pressure in those early days was intense; eventually she lost her job at the beauty shop. Nonetheless, she kept at the task - raising money, attending public hearings, ferreting out information - until 1989 when, burned out by the workload, she finally left NACE. "It was hard," she admits today. Her warm face, normally animated with bright humor, smooths out into a solemn expression. "We paid our bills whatever way we could. We gave concerts, wrote newsletters, sold T-shirts. Our biggest enemy has been the veil of secrecy behind which the nuclear industry operates. Until the mid-80s most people around here thought the plant was some kind of oil refinery. Before I started in on this, I was ignorant too." Her face darkens. "The worst of it was the fact that every day I learned something about the world I didn't really want to know."

Winding out of the hills onto the lush bottomlands of the Arkansas River, you can easily see Sequoyah Fuels, sometimes from several miles away. Between the trees it flashes into view, with a stack or two standing over the branches - a compact, square complex of industrial architecture, neat, clean, geometrically exact. From a distance it looks like a state-of-the-art factory anywhere in North America - a pleasant place where workers manufacturers furniture or even chocolate candy. It's only when you get up close and see the eight-foot-high wire fence topped with triple strands of barbed wire and hear the grating, insect-like hum of the machinery that you begin to wonder what really goes on behind the walls.

The plant cost $20 million to build; tucked inside its unassuming exterior was an array of sophisticated equipment designed to convert uranium oxide (yellowcake) into uranium hexafluoride (UF6) - step three of the nuclear fuel conversion cycle. (Only one other plant in the U.S. does the same work.) Transforming uranium ore into nuclear war-leads or nuclear energy was a complicated process. First the ore was mined and sifted into a granulated powder, then milled into the dough-like yellowcake. At Sequoyah Fuels, the yellowcake was heated to liquid form, UF6, then drained into cylinder to solidify again. The cylinders were then sent to plants in Paducah, Kentucky, and Portsmouth, Ohio where the UF6 was enriched with uranium 235 for the fabrication of nuclear weapons, fuel pellets and radiological medicines.

The primary waste at the Sequoyah facility is a liquid sludge called raffinate. Properly treated, it loses as much as 95 percent of its radioactivity. But in 1969, KM requested permission to dispose of untreated raffinate by injecting it into wells reaching deep into the limestone below Gore. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) granted them this license, although later regulators refused to renew it because the porous limestone wasn't holding the raffinate. KM then got permission to pour the raffinate into two storage ponds with a combined capacity of 25 million gallons. Three years later in 1974, monitors showed that the raffinate in the ponds was leaking into the ground-water, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which replaced AEC, waited until 1984 to decide that excess liquid should be removed from the storage ponds.

For years NRC also allowed KM to routinely discharge other radioactive waste into a drainage ditch which flowed into the Illinois River, a few hundred yards above its confluence with the Arkansas. And in 1976 it allowed the plant to experiment with using raffinate as farm fertilizer so long as the food wasn't consumed directly by humans, a program that still continues. At first, the raffinate burns or kills all vegetation in the fields. Within a year or two, some crops grow back. According to NACE, raffinate is sprayed from tanker trucks, producing an arc 45 feet high that gets carried by the wind onto public roads and private property. Family pets, ornamental shrubs and trees, and cattle have reportedly died. Squirrels have suffered when oak trees beside the treated fields ceased producing acorns.

Pam Bennett, spokesperson for Sequoyah Fuels, defends the program. "This is a fertilizer application program, not a raffinate program," she insists. "Before it is applied, the raffinate is tested at least three times. Constant samples taken from fields treated by this method have revealed no negative effects. There is nothing intrinsically bad about the program. Unfortunately, negative public perception has clouded the issue."

In 1987, KM sold Sequoyah Fuels to General Atomics (GA) Corporation of San Diego, a shadowy company with ties to countries and institutions that operate in the murky penumbra of the high-tech international energy business. It is privately owned by two brothers from Denver, Neal and Kinden Blue. Since acquiring GA from Chevron in 1986, they have branched off into different pursuits, most notably the manufacture of modular water-cooled nuclear reactors, targeted for developing overseas countries. Rumors regarding shady deals such as the acquisition of idle South African uranium mines and the laundering of ore through Russia and Europe to U.S. markets drift off the company like a bad odor. Friends in high places, such as former Secretary of State Al Haig, a member of an advisory committee, have helped catapult General Atomics into direct competition with megacorps such as Bechtel and Westinghouse Electric.

Secrecy, sleight-of-hand, and obfuscation - the three-headed Cerberean dog of the nuclear power industry - have guarded the portals to its inner workings since the beginning. Hatched under the tightest security imaginable, the consequences of the Manhattan Project in 1945 surprised everyone, including the people most intimately involved. The Atomic Energy Acts of 1946 and 1954 allowed private industry to tap into this astounding new energy source. The result was a cozy alliance between the federal government and corporate enterprises; a study found that 307 of the 429 NRC senior personnel come from private corporations with contacts in the nuclear industry. With everyone on both sides bedding down on the same mattress, it has been difficult to identify the enemy. In the wake of the accident that killed James Harrison, the NRC fined KM $310,000, which hardly made a dent in its profit margin.

The house where Ed Henshaw lives has been in the family since 1877. It's comfortable, roomy, built of wood, with a porch that wraps around the sides. Once it sat on the spot now occupied by Sequoyah Fuels. Reluctantly, knowing the plant would be a boon to their local economy, Ed's family sold the land to KM in 1969. The location was ideal: 50 miles from the nearest urban center, close to a railroad and Interstate 40, beside a plentiful supply of water. Both the Arkansas and Illinois Rivers had helped the fortunes of Ed's family; before any bridges in the area were built, the family operated a ferry services across the two rivers.

Ed's house was moved a mile and a half south, and he went to work at the plant as a laborer, carrying containers of milled yellowcake off the trains and trucks. Things went smoothly at first - the job was steady, the money was good, the community began to prosper. Then Ed started noticing irregularities. The workmanship inside the plant was shoddy. Valves leaked, there were yellowcake spills, airborne uranium levels sometimes reached critical proportions. The company burned contaminated trash out in the open. And Ed was bothered that the NRC always seemed to call ahead before sending an inspection team onto the premises, giving plant managers plenty of time to clean up and repaint.

By the early 1980s, so much raffinate had been pumped down the well that some of it began surfacing in nearby streams and ponds. When the company tried to close a road near the plant to install a new dump site, ED spoke up. "The effects of radiation exposure don't show up until way down the line," he says. A sturdy, foursquare man, he sits solidly in a straightbacked chair at the kitchen table of his ancestral house, his feet planted firmly on the floor. "Local hunters and fishermen begun to report some oddities. Fish without eyes. A two-headed bird. A nine-legged frog, which I actually saw. I decided it was time to get involved."

He started digging into Sequoyah's history. The managers resisted at first, stone-walling his request for documents. Then, to dampen his enthusiasm, they deluged him with paper. "I read every scrap they gave me," he says. "Then I stood up in meetings, I asked tough questions, I became openly confrontational. The company's behavior was arrogant and irresponsible. They manipulate the regulatory agencies whichever way they want." Ed quit the company in 1984. Today he works for the Forestry Division of the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture.

In 1987 NACE conducted a health survey of homes within a 10-mile radius of the plant. The result, evaluated by the International Institute of Concern for Public Health in Toronto, were disturbing. Ninety-eight percent of the 350 houses polled reported some kind of cancer or birth defect. When Jessie Deer-in-Water tried to explain the meaning of these statistics to members of the community, she ran into a solid wall of denial. The president of the Vian State Bank in her home town told her bluntly, "At the risk of my own grandchild's life, I want to keep Sequoyah Fuels operating in this county." The man's wife died a couple of years later of cancer. A worker at the plant told Jessie, "Everybody's got to die, and I'd rather die eating steak than beans."

Lance Hughes became director of NACE in 1990. A native Oklahoma of Creek Indian ancestry, Lance dropped out of school in the seventh grade. His father worked on the oils rigs, and his family migrated all over the state. Despite a lack of formal education, Lance - now 38 years old, bearded, with a gentle voice and easygoing manner that masks a steely resolve to get things done - brings an encyclopedic knowledge to bear on the problems of nuclear pollution.

In August 1990, workers excavating a storage pit at Sequoyah Fuels found themselves waist-deep in a pool of contaminated water. They requested protective equipment, but their supervisors told them to quit complaining and get back to work. The plant's environmental manager told an NRC official that she had no idea why the water was so yellow. "Maybe a big dog pissed in it," she reportedly said. The official wasn't amused; later test found that the yellow water contained 35,000 times the level of uranium deemed tolerable to human exposure by the NRC. An investigation also revealed that the contamination in the pit had been brought to the attention of the Sequoyah Fuels management two weeks before the incident, but that the management had delayed notifying the NRC. (Under NRC regulations, it should have been reported within 24 hours.) The new owners, General Atomics, seemed much like the old ones.

Like a Sluggish bear hibernating in a deep cave, the NRC began to wake up to its responsibilities as a bonafide regulatory agency. NACE zeroed in on NRC's cavalier disregard for Sequoyah's excesses. "We needed to clarify the problem," Lance Hughes says, "and the problem was as much NRC's lack of action as it was Sequoyah's chronic habit of pollution." With the Cherokee Nation Tribal Government, NACE petitioned the NRC to revoke Sequoyah Fuel's license. In October 1991, after a 14-month probe of the yellow water incident, the NRC shut down the plant, citing routing violations of safety standards and cover-up serious environmental problems. After losing $130,000 a day during this shutdown, Sequoyah Fuels resumed operations in April 1992, albeit under 24-hour NRC surveillance. But two months later, the NRC rejected the petition from NACE and the Cherokee Nation, saying that revocation of its license "would be an excessively harsh and unwarranted remedy."

Sequoyah Fuels recruited new management and instituted new safety procedures. But no November 17, 1992, a batch of volatile chemicals mixed out of sequence sent a nitrogen dioxide plume creeping through the plant and out into the countryside. The plant's utter lack of preparedness to deal with this emergency indicates how little the company had really learned in the six years since the accident that killed James Neil Harrison. According to an investigation released by NACE in September 1993, the workers hadn't followed written procedures for mixing the chemicals, they had entered the contaminated area without the proper respiratory equipment, and the on-site airhorn had failed to sound.

But the gravest regulatory violation was Sequoyah Fuels failure to warn the public outside the gates by blaring its off-site alarm as the toxic plume drifted towards the town of Gore. (NACE later learned that plant authorities sent inspectors with detection devices chasing after the plume by car in a bizarre Keystone Cops caper to learn its precise toxic content!) Because the alarm was silent, people who might have taken shelter suffered injuries from the toxic release.

Fully awake and growling with righteous indignation, the NRC ordered the plant to halt reduction temporarily. Sensing the words, Sequoyah Fuels president Joe Sheppard ruefully remarked, "You can commit a lot of sins with respect to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but if they lose confidence in your management process, that's a kind of a mortal sin." On November 21, 1992, the company announced the decommissioning of the plant in June 1993; the long, nasty, unpleasant war appeared to be over.

Or was it? A new struggle is brewing over the cost of "decommissioning" the facility. On February 16, 1993, Sequoyah Fuels presented a preliminary plan contending that radiation levels around the plant are minimal enough to dispose of the wastes on site.

The proposal angered Lance Hughes. "Sequoyah Fuels is trying to duck responsibility on the cleanup. NACE has sponsored an independent hydrological report indicating that there are currently 91,252 pounds of uranium in the soil and ground-water on the 85-acre site, as opposed to the 21,000 pounds touted by Sequoyah Fuels. They think they can bury it on site, but we won't let them do that. Once it's out of sight, it's out of mind. That's the way it's always been with the nuclear industry."

Pam Bennett disagrees. "Sequoyah Fuels does not represent a threat to the off-site community. The impact of the waste generated by the plant in both the soil and water can be confined do the premises. Sequoyah Fuels is committed to eastern Oklahoma. We want the plant to stay in the area. We are working on several alternative proposals, such as retooling the plant to convert depleted DOE uranium into a more benign form."

Local people differ over Sequoyah Fuel's plans. Ed Henshaw says, "I'd like to see them bulldoze the place, level it, and have Sequoyah get out and never come back." But Lance Hughes replies, "It's our mess, and we certainly don't want it trucked off into somebody else's backyard. Our job now is to keep the liability squarely on the corporations. The parties responsible have to keep the waste above ground. It needs to be stored in concrete or glass bunkers until our technology comes up with a method for disposing of it properly."

Estimates of the cleanup cost have risen from the first rockbottom figure of $750,000 - "That amount doesn't even begin to define the problem," sniffs Jessie Deer-in-Water - to $21.5 million. No doubt the cost will inflate a lot more. No doubt, too, the federal government will help Sequoyah Fuels and General Atomics avoid paying too much in penalties. "Think about it," says Lance Hughes. "The federal government created the nuclear industry in the 1940s. They invited private companies to participate. They did little or no policing while the companies manufactured tons of life-threatening carcinogens. Now, with the aid of government grants, the same companies are being encouraged to develop cleanup technologies, which they can sell to their subsidiaries, other companies, and foreign markets. Who inevitably will bear the burden of the cost? The taxpayer, of course." His sensitive face registers anguish and disgust. "Meanwhile, out here in the boonies, people are drying prematurely of cancer, we got fish in the rivers that nobody wants to eat, and babies are being born with bad kidneys and lungs."