Continuation of “Working the Mare Island Nukes.” Three men in their early thirties, James, Kevin and Gerry, are telling a reporter about defueling and refueling nuclear submarines. The “head” is the top half of the “containment vessel” that surrounds the plutonium fuel cells and control rods in the reactor that powers the sub.
FG: How many men are involved all together in removing the head?
James: A couple of hundred – and there’s radioactivity being emitted at the REM level until the fuel-removal stack-up is assembled.
Kevin: A key step is guiding the fuel-removal container down over the fuel cells.
FG: How is that done?
Kevin: By crane. And riggers – men saying “Move it this way. A little bit that way…” Somebody climbs up on top the thing, hooks an S-hook onto it and says, “Okay, I’m ready take it up.”
FG: Is that the most dangerous job in terms of exposure to radiation?
Kevin: Nope. There’s cats that actually get down to the bottom where the fuel cells actually were, and clean it up. That and resin discharge.
FG: Who does that?
Kevin: The only Blacks in the nuclear program – just about. There are about 10,000 people employed at Mare Island. Maybe 40 percent are Black, but only 1 percent in the nuclear program. And they’re the ones down there cleaning up the core, the dirtiest work.
Gerry: They treat them even lower than they treat us. We’re all just grunts working for ’em. They sit up there in their leaded box, up there in the control station, telling us to hurry up. How they hell can you hurry up when you’re trying to be safe?
James: In the training they tell you not to worry, radiation’s safe, more people die of electrical shock. In all your classes they tell you how safe the nuclear program is ’cause we take all these precautions. They say nobody’s ever died from radiation! This shit’s not gonna hurt you, and after you’ve had so many hours’ exposure, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you, we’ll put you in another job. You’ve got a guaranteed future here.
Kevin: And it’s true, statistically, nuclear power has a good safety record compared to coal or the chemical industry – because the effects don’t catch up with you for 10, 15 years.
FG: It typically takes how long to defuel a nuclear sub?
James: Depends. If they have even little dinky problem it could be held up as long as 10 to 12 weeks. If they have no problems, a week to 10 days. That’s what it’s supposed to take. But I’d say in five years we’ve done less than five without any holdups.
Kevin: In other words, out of all the ships we’ve defueled, five were done without incident. And some of the incidents weren’t so little. One time we had a fuel container stuck. The crane malfunctioned. We stood out there with fire hoses in case it went critical. FIRE HOSES! (in an officer’s voice) “Regroup upwind!” (back in character) HAH! In our little yellow uniforms! And there it was, swaying in the wind, the spent fuel itself in a 20-foot high removal container!
FG: The crane was transferring it to where?
Kevin: To railroad cars on the dock – specially fitted cars with fresh-water cooling systems. They take it by rail to Idaho. Guarded by a lieutenant with a .45. That’s it – a lieutenant, the conductor and the brakeman. In a country full of maniacs. Can you believe it? And they’re so security conscious!
James: This was a special crane, several hundred feet tall and highly tested, supposedly. It’s not supposed to get stuck. Turned out to be a governor problem. It mistakenly registered “overload.” The back-up piece of equipment was a fire-engine ladder. But that day the fire engine was in a parade in Vallejo! It took them two days to figure out how they were going to safely transfer this fuel cell hanging in the air to another crane. They were scared shitless.
FG: How did they do it?
James: Went up alongside it with a crane and a skiff box. I was the they. I hooked up a cooling device to the container.
FG: In the time it was hanging there, how much radiation was released into the atmosphere?
Kevin: Who the fuck knows? According to them, none. But that’s a lot of plutonium hanging up there. One fuel cell’s got enough to make numerous bombs.
FG: When did this happen?
Kevin: Four or five years ago. In July.
FG: Did it make the news?
Kevin: (officer’s voice) An accident report was written and published in regard to that incident.
Gerry: A bullshit cover-up report.
FG: If the fuel cell crashed down from the crane, or with the crane, would that have been Vallejo’s Three-Mile Island?
James: Hard to say.
Kevin: I’d say the closest we came to endangering civilians was when we had to dump a whole lot of hot, contaminated water into the bay.
FG: When was that?
James: All the time. We used to process the contaminated water by “dilution.” In other words, you’ve got 1,000 gallons of contaminated water. You pump 50 gallons of that water into another tank, add 5,000 gallons of water, and you’ve got five-thousand and fifty gallons of diluted water which can be pumped overboard. It’s an ‘acceptable’ radiation level. Then you do the same thing with another 50 gallons. Over and over again until it’s all pumped overboard. At high tide. This was the standard procedure for many years.
Gerry: They still do it in an emergency.
Kevin: You do anything in an emergency.
James: How many times did we dump water in the Bay hooking up the C-29s? [a term I didn’t get a definition of.] That reactor is in critical condition when you’re pumping that water out.
Kevin: Every time we defuel, some water goes in the Bay.
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FG: Where is the dry dock located in relation to downtown Vallejo?
Kevin: Directly across the river from downtown. Mare Island’s not really an island, it’s a peninsula with mud flats. Across the river from the dry dock you’ve got marinas, restaurants, offices…
FG:Who are the major employers in Vallejo?
Kevin: Mare Island’s the biggest. Then there’s Kaiser Steel, C&H Sugar refiners, Sperry Mills [food processors].
Kevin: It’s cheaper to pay one guy to work overtime than put another guy on at straight time. Straight time, from their point of view, costs almost $25 an hour with benefits –sick leave, health plan, annual leave, retirement plan and so on. But overtime is just time and a half of your regular salary. So if you’re making $10 an hour, overtime costs them $15.
James: We were working so much overtime they finally made it a mandatory percentage. You couldn’t work more than 25 percent more than your regular work week. Before that, everybody in the nuclear program was like doubling their income.
Kevin: In one pay period I was averaging 80 hours a week.
James: People were working 12 hours a day because they were “necessary.” They were part of the refueling program. But who can make good decision when you’re working 12 hours a day? Everybody gets tired. You can’t go good work…. One time I was sent to Berkeley to be decontaminated at the Radiation Lab. I was setting a relief valve – checking it to see if it would work at a certain setting – and this plastic plug gave and I got squired. Got contaminated water in my nose.
Kevin: Then there’d be phone calls at night. They’d say “What do we do now?” And my subconscious would have to come up with an answer. My subconscious would have to make a decision. The next morning I wouldn’t even remember.
Having grown up in Vallejo and Benicia, knowing some of the rich wartime history of the area, attending events on Mare Island, and then eventually going on spontaneous day and night trips with my friends as teenagers to explore the abandoned warehouses and outbuildings, this article while reminiscent of my younger years, definitely makes me want to do more investigating. Remembering the lot of vibrant warning signs splayed all over the sides of dilapidated buildings and hanging on broken fences didn’t encumber us from our curiosities. We were all over that island from the bridge to the mud flats; finding ways to crawl into spaces we had no idea where it led, touching random objects that appeared to be “just old parts and tools”, finding an enormous steel structure that resembled an oven capable of cooking 10 people at once (in our minds), tip-toeing out onto rusted beams and old cranes 100 ft up at night. Had no qualms about exposure from the mounds of dust being kicked up as we walked into places that hadn’t seen a person in decades. The floor dust was caked on like snow, leaving thick detailed outlines of the soles of our shoes. It was so surreal because everything seemed to be left. Rusty equipment, name tags, tools, parts, cans of various liquids, refrigerators with extremely old contents inside, entire classrooms full of antique desks, and what looked to be documents strewn about with schedules and signatures about equipment maintenance logs. I guess that’s what happens in an industry where governments don’t allocate money to safely eradicate future use of facilities that have tested positive for nuclear radiation in a timely manner. These days, security can go either way. I’ve walked around for a few hours with no security approaching, while other times they pull up within 30 minutes.
I don’t believe our comparatively small bit of exposure would’ve caused significant damage, but reading about the contaminated water being dumped into Carquinez-Strait and the lies higher-ups told their subordinates and trainees, manipulations that more than likely did affect their health later in life, running through the various scenarios that could’ve affected surrounding citizens all of those years and the risks they took. It’d be interesting to see data on the specific job titles, who primarily worked those jobs and for how long, and their medical records or what their current health conditions are in some kind of comparative analysis report. I found a couple of publications and EPA reports with some good data, but they’re quite lengthy, so have to keep reading. I appreciate your interview though, gives me a lot to think about and research. Was there anything they told you that you didn’t publish in this article?