PROLOGUE

In the Spring of 1977 I was sent in a team of union laborers to the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant for the yearly maintenance shut-down. For a month we worked six and seven-day weeks, ten to twelve hours a day, at the best wages I’d ever seen personally. I call it a “holiday” for the simple reason that there was practically no work for us to do, and we filled all those hours as best we could with naps, conversation, cards, reading matter, getting loaded, and staring into space.

Trojan. Who on earth picked that name for the only nuclear power facility ever built in Oregon? The plant’s logo featured an image of the head of that famous wooden horse left as an insidious gift at the gates of Sparta. In 1970, like the unsuspecting Trojans before us, Oregonians opened the gates and wheeled in this icon of modern technology. In the years that followed, many grew to mistrust this gift horse, peered into it’s mouth apprehensively, and lobbied for it’s removal. Arguing the other side were such folks as the Governor of Washington: “Well, eating is more dangerous than nuclear power. After all, 300 people died in the US last year after choking on their food.” The Governor of New Hampshire contributed: “We had a shark problem off our beaches a few weeks ago, and if we can handle the sharks I guess we can handle nuclear power.”

In 1993 Trojan was shut down after a series of malfunctions and finally an unprecedented agreement between environmentalists and Portland General Electric that in the long run it would be cheaper to close the facility than to keep it open. Today it stands empty except for a large cache of nuclear waste we still have no other place to warehouse. While nuclear power may seem a dead horse in 21st century America, I can tell you that as of this writing (May 2017) there are still over 61 nuclear power plants operating in the USA. I hope (but do not know) that they have their act together better today than in the 1970s. I can tell you what I saw in the belly of the beast in 1977, and you may draw your own conclusions.

ROLLING IN MONEY

When Portland General Electric (PGE) began construction of Trojan on the banks of the Columbia River in the early 1970s, several friends of mine in Astoria (50 miles down river) found employment there at various stages of the work. The stories they told were hard to believe. Lots of overtime, plus Saturdays and Sundays at time-and-a-half or double-time, meant that even the lowest-paid crafts were grossing over $500 a week, with as much as $1000 not uncommon. At the same time the work pace was at an all-time low. Scores of men with nothing to do were given brooms and told to look busy. Many sought out places to sleep, play poker, drink, smoke, and BS. With everybody rolling in money, drugs of every description and even women were available in the employee parking lot. By the time I got there, there were many legendary stories from those construction days, for example the fellow who only showed up once a week — to pick up his check. After a few months of this he was discovered and discharged, but he symbolized the absolute minimum effort necessary to get by on the Trojan project.

And so it went for several years, but then, just before the job was finished, a legal challenge by environmental groups threatened to shut down the whole project. PGE’s answer, well one of them anyway, was to hire hundreds of extra men for whom there was absolutely nothing to do, and for the last few months the place was literally awash with surplus workers. According to my friends, it got so crowded that it was difficult to find a good place to sleep anymore. Apparently PGE calculated that the working man would take the cash and tell the environmentalists to bug off. This ploy seems to have characterized the company’s public relations strategy from the get-go.

KEEP BREATHING UNTIL QUITTING TIME

At 8 AM I joined a group of about 100 men milling around in front of the plant’s entrance building, where every worker passes in and out under the scrutiny of armed guards and metal detectors. No one was allowed inside the perimeter fence until he had been oriented, photographed, checked over with a Geiger counter and badged. For the next three days we were briefed on safety regulations and radiation control procedures, and given a rudimentary explanation of the plant’s operation. Afterwards there was a written exam. Those who passed were issued little blue cards, those who failed got little yellow cards, and the next day we all went to work

Ten of us climbed down a metal ladder into a subterranean corridor that runs in a full circle under the reactor silo. There we were shown a pile of thick grease which had leaked out of an overhead valve. We cleaned this up in about half an hour with four or five working and four or five watching. The rest of the day we spent shooting the breeze and pitching pennies against the corridor wall.

The next day they sent us down to the new sewage treatment plant outside the gates. Trucks pulled up and dumped loads of gravel, but there was no backhoe to spread it, so about twenty of us spent the day doing with shovels what a machine could have done in about an hour. Every couple of hours our foreman would pay us a visit, and far from being dismayed at our slow progress, he would drawl, “Take your time boys, we’re not in any hurry here. Just take it easy…”

Among us was a country-western musician who was worried about the upcoming division into day and night crews, as a night crew assignment would interfere with his music jobs. The last time our foreman came around, the musician brought up his problem. The reply was swift and final: “Well if you don’t want to work nights, maybe you better just go down the road and pick up your check,” and that was it for him. On the spot I learned that at Trojan it mattered not who you were, what you could do, or how hard you worked — just be there in the morning, keep breathing until quitting time, and keep a low profile.

HOT TIMES

On a Saturday morning we entered “containment” for the first time. The containment building contains the reactor itself, and is the silo-shaped structure with the dome roof visible from the highways on either side of the Columbia River. We all wore bright yellow protective suits and hoods, with orange rubber gloves and black and yellow galoshes. The only exposed part was the face from hairline to chin, and the total effect pretty bizarre. After a time I came to realize that this uniform breeds a certain equality inside containment as nobody can tell who you are or what your job is. Unless you were familiar with a particular face, it was impossible to tell the plant supervisor or a nuclear physicist from the lowliest laborer (me). Containment was also the only area that was free of the many security guards so numerous in all other parts of the plant, and unless someone failed to obey posted instructions, such as changing into clean boots when emerging from a particularly contaminated area, one’s presence there was never challenged. This made containment one of the most popular places for sleeping, and it was a common sight to see yellow-clad bodies sprawled like disaster victims along the halls and decks of the reactor silo.

Inside it was hot. The reactor was still in the process of cooling off, having been shut down only 24 hours before. We were given wet Kimwipes and told to wipe down all surfaces: walls, pipes, tanks, floors, and railings, and then to put the soiled wipes into big plastic trash bags. As I made my rounds I discovered a large ventilating fan sucking air out, and I stayed as close to it as I could to relieve the oppressive heat.

On the way out of containment, my moustache turned out to be “hot” (radioactive) enough to set off the alarm on the Geiger counter we were frisked with by the radiation control engineer. They told me that, possibly as a result of hanging out near the exhaust fan, I had been exposed to some radioactive gas that had leaked into the air. I was instructed to wash carefully. That particular isotope was short-lived, and shaving off my moustache was deemed unnecessary. Another fellow was not so lucky and had to have some of his hair cut off after something dripped on his head and soaked through the cloth hood. We were advised of the importance of keeping our suits dry.

We made three trips into containment during that ten-hour working day. Each time we wiped for an hour, the rest of the time was consumed in getting dressed and undressed, resting, and playing poker. It was one of most strenuous days I was to experience at Trojan.

The next day was Sunday, scheduled as a twelve-hour shift paying double-time. The original plan was to continue wiping things down in containment, but that program was abandoned for some reason, and we spent all day making $15.74 an hour wandering around with a broom and dustpan sweeping up. Since the actual maintenance work hadn’t really begun yet, the big turbine room I had been assigned to was immaculately clean, and my entire output for the day yielded half-a-dozen cigarette butts, a few sunflower seed hulls, and a handful of dust.

The same days’ Oregon Journal carried a full-color front page photo of the big turbine I had spent the day dusting, and a headline that read: “PGE ASKS FOR 8% RATE HIKE.” I read the story with interest. It seemed that PGE (known among the workers at Trojan as “Portland Generous”) not only had to have this increase, but that it was an emergency — they had to have it right now. This meant that instead of going through regular channels they were applying directly to the Public Utilities Commissioner. (The good Commissioner later denied this urgent request.)

COST PLUS CALYPSO

During my first week I heard a lot of stories about the work pace and the “cost plus” contract. Cost-plus means simply that the contractor is paid whatever it costs him to complete the work, plus an agreed-upon profit margin. Hence they could care less how many guys had nothing to do as long as the work got done more or less according to schedule. One morning over breakfast in Ranier with a pipe fitter, I was told that he and 75 other pipe fitters had been on the job for two weeks at $100 a day before they were given any pipes to weld. A few seconds with a pencil and I was looking at $76,000 from Portland Generous. This fellow also confided to me that the day they asked him to work inside containment would be the day he went looking for another job.

Many of the older laborers were assigned to “fire watch,” which consisted of watching a welder and standing by with a fire extinguisher in case something caught fire. Since everything at Trojan was either steel or concrete, the chance of fire was remote. In any case, most of the time the welders were simply sitting around smoking cigarettes. Most people who work with their hands find it difficult to sit and watch somebody else work. But to sit and watch somebody else not  work does something funny to one’s sense of values and the idea of making an honest living. At least one young man I knew soon quit in disgust and boredom and went to look for an actual job of work. I hadn’t been dispatched to a job all the previous winter, had been fined twice by the Union for falling behind in my dues, and had eked out an existence by delivering newspapers and pumping gas. I stayed on.

Workers fell into petty disputes over territory. Once I was called in to clean up some oil in a catch pan under a machine that the millwrights had been working on. Glad to have something to do for a change, I cleaned up the oil and then began wiping up some smears of grease on the front of the machine. As I was doing this, my foreman came up and told me he had received a complaint that I was infringing on millwrights’ work by wiping the machine and had better desist immediately. Some gung-ho union men with nothing else to do were always on the lookout for a carpenter with a shovel in his hand or a laborer with a hammer, for which they could apparently send the offender “down the road.”

On the maintenance crew, all the workers were issued blue hard hats while the foremen wore white hats. After a while I began to notice just how many white hats there were, and I started keeping count. These white hats never did a lick of work, they just wandered around checking on their crews (if they could find them) and chatting with each other. When my count reached 25 I gave it up; I would estimate one white hat for every 7 or 8 blue hats. The white hats performed other important tasks such as running the weekly check pool. They would collect $1 from anyone interested and determine the winner from the configuration of numbers on our paychecks. In our carpenter-laborer pool there was usually about $100. Winners were pressured to buy a keg at the local tavern after work.

THE FLOOD

During my second week on the job there was a serious mishap in containment. Some workers were asked to remove a metal plate from a boiler, and when they did so, out poured 1500 gallons of highly radioactive water, flooding the entire ground floor of the reactor silo. For some reason, a lot of the drains did not function at all, and so we (the laborers) were called in to mop up the mess. For this job we were provided with full-face respirators as well as the usual protective gear, and wore two pairs of galoshes instead of one. With mops and brooms we got the water into buckets or swept it into the drains that did work, while all around us Geiger counters buzzed like angry wasps. Many parts of the ground floor are a maze of pipes and boilers, and consequently this was slow and awkward work. The task of wiping down and thoroughly decontaminating the whole ground floor was apparently too much for the plant management to contemplate, so this was done only in areas where maintenance work had to be done, and the other areas were cordoned off with warning barriers for the remainder of the shut down.

Around this time I began to take a personal interest in all this radiation, and one day I picked up a Geiger counter and began to check for myself. Some areas of containment appeared to be relatively uncontaminated, while others (such as the cordoned-off areas mentioned above) emitted a blast of radiation that set my instrument to chattering wildly. In the subsequent weeks I was seen with a Geiger counter so often that a lot of people began to assume I was a radiation control engineer. Sometimes I would find a group of men lounging in a particularly hot area and would tell them so, but they usually ignored this information and went back to their chit-chat. A lot of the workers seemed to take the attitude that “a little more radiation isn’t going to hurt me now,” and there was a black sense of humor in their conversation. Radiation cannot be seen or felt, and once you have taken this fatalistic attitude, it is easy to pretend it isn’t there.

In the aftermath of the flooding accident there was increasing attention paid to the changing of gloves and galoshes when passing from the ground floor to other less-contaminated areas, and I was assigned a daily detail of collecting, bagging, and packing out contaminated gear, and bringing in fresh supplies of galoshes and gloves. This usually took less than an hour, and there was nothing to do on the outside except for fire watch and broom patrol, so I searched around for a quiet spot to nap. I finally found a spacious cubbyhole well off the beaten track, and checking with the Geiger counter found it to be practically free of radiation though I was only about 50 feet from the reactor’s core. Following the example of less reclusive sleepers I had observed in containment, I fashioned a comfortable air mattress out of the big plastic trash bags and brought in a small alarm clock to wake me up for lunch. The long, boring days at Trojan, the two hours driving back and forth from Astoria, and the all-night  domestic wrangles I was going through at the time were ameliorated by the three or four hours of daily sleep I averaged in my reactor rest house for as long as the work went on in containment.

When the mopping up operation was concluded, a team of experts came in to research and repair the cause of the accidental spill. They set up a battery of instruments and TV monitors in a decontaminated section of the ground floor, and I watched with interest over their shoulders as they sent remote control TV camera probes into various parts of the reactor. What the cameras picked up was displayed on the monitor screens, and this process went on for several days.

A few feet behind us in the corridor there was a leaking water pipe overhead, and remembering the fellow who’d gotten a free haircut after out first day in containment, I decided to file a report on this hazard as we’d been instructed during our orientation days. When I handed it to my foreman, he gave me a blank look and said, “I don’t know what to do with this — try the boys in radiation control.” The rad-con men glanced at my report and told me to deliver it to so-and-so on the top floor of the adjacent building.

When I arrived by elevator at the top floor, I suddenly found myself in the main control room. It looked just like scenes from “The China Syndrome,” a 1979 movie about a near-meltdown at a nuclear power plant that by coincidence was released the same month that the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania suffered a near-meltdown and effectively put an end to the construction of any more nuclear plants in this country. The room was a vast array of meters, lights, buttons, knobs, switches, and monitor screens of every size and description. Nobody paid the least attention to me, so I loitered awhile taking it all in before delivering my note and returning to terra firma.

Several days later I ran across a pair of very nervous plumbers wandering around in containment. This was their first trip into the reactor silo and they weren’t a bit pleased about it. I showed them the leak and went off to have a nap. When I awoke several hours later, I found that they’d taped a sheet of plastic to the leaky pipe, diverting the drip to one side of the footpath, and gotten the hell out of there. This might be a good time to mention that it seemed as if leak repair was the main activity during shut-down maintenance: pipes, valves, boilers — drip, drip, drip everywhere.

WATCH THE CRANES

One morning my foreman approached me with a huge grin on his face. Trying his best to be serious, he explained that he had an important special assignment for me. Word had come down from on high that a number of men had been found, upon emerging from containment, to have somehow contaminated their private parts with radioactivity. This unfortunate epidemic was thought to have resulted from an influx of pornographic literature apparently smuggled into the reactor silo. My job: find and confiscate these fuck books.

Armed with this warrant and a plastic bag, I began a thorough search of the area, taking my time as always. Whether you favor or oppose nuclear power, the scale of the technology is impressive. As I toured the reactor building I contemplated the massive complex from every angle. At the top of the silo, a gigantic crane spans the diameter, big enough to lift anything that lies below. The operator reaches his control booth on the crane by means of a small metal ladder fastened to the wall, climbing another 100 feet above the highest scaffold — about 200 feet above the ground floor. From this dizzy height you have panoramic view of the entire reactor, and it was here that I found the hottest contraband. The word must have gotten out that my patrol was on it’s way because so far I had found only a few tattered copies of Playboy and Penthouse, but in the crane operator’s cubicle I found one of those green-covered novels from the Olympia Press in Paris. It dealt with various activities of randy young schoolgirls, dirty old men, and big German Shepherd dogs. Moral: always watch your step around cranes — the driver might be going blind.

THE PINK SLIP

One day the big news over lunch was that the plant superintendent, taking a federal inspection team on a tour of the facility, had walked right into the middle of a big poker game taking place behind a boiler in the turbine building. The poker players had been “severely reprimanded,” but when the work was nearly completed and I got laid off, the poker players were still on the job. Yes, after a month on the job that old pink slip turned up in my pay envelope, and counting up the totals I found that I’d made over $3000, a fortune to me at the time. Celebratory partying followed immediately, and soon ate up all that easy money. I quit the Laborers Union.

That Summer I returned to Trojan for a series of protest demonstrations, aiming to bite the hand that had fed me so well. One morning I spotted the plant superintendent Bart Withers, in a white hat, strolling just inside the fence. We had a brief conversation through the chain link mesh. “I worked here during the shut-down this year,” I told him. “Why was there nothing for us to do?” “Well…uh,” he replied, “we had some delays getting some of our materials.”

POSTSCRIPT

In 2005 the decommissioned reactor was gift-wrapped and shipped to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State and buried in a pit under 45 feet of gravel. On May 20, 2006 the cooling tower was turned into rubble in a controlled demolition implosion while environmentalists in boats on the Columbia cheered. The spent fuel is still stored on site in 34 dry casks. It was supposed to be sent to the Yucca Mountain Repository until that project was de-funded by Congress in 2011.