Beverly Gattis Interview, Part 1 of 2

  • TRANSCRIPT INTERVIEWEE: Beverly Gattis (BG) INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT) and David Weisman (DW) DATE: October 4, 2002 LOCATION: Amarillo, Texas TRANSCRIBERS: Chris Flores and Robin Johnson REELS: 2215
  • Please note that the video includes roughly 60 seconds of color bars and sound tone for technical settings at the outset of the recordings.
  • DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas.
  • It's October 4, 2002 and we're in Amarillo, Texas, at the home of Beverly Gattis who's been kind enough to sit down with us and talk about some of her experiences working with STAND on struggles against nuclear waste disposal in the panhandle, and also oversight of the Pantex site, which is outside of Amarillo.
  • So I want to take this chance to thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
  • BG: My pleasure.
  • DT: I thought we might start by talking a little bit about your childhood and if there might have been some experience or some person in your family or your circle of friends who might've introduced you to the outdoors or to environmental concerns.
  • BG: Well, my mother was raised on a farm in central Texas, and she always cared a lot about gardening and such, but both of my parents my father was raised in the panhandle area.
  • Though he was not an outdoorsman in any way, shape or form, they respected that you leave things as good as you find them, you are not careless with things.
  • But and I always just had an inclination to be outside and in nature. Girl Scouts helped, oddly enough, I mean, I I was in a troop that did outdoor things and we didn't make a lot of potholders and stuff like that. And so that was that was really helpful, you know, and it just felt right so I it's my own inclination as well.
  • But just the upbringing of respect, I think, and a real affinity for animals and things like that. So it just came naturally to me, I don't think I could've avoided it if I'd wanted to. Uh-oh.
  • DT: We talked earlier about your early days, childhood days, and some of your experiences in Girl Scouts and so on. Can you maybe take us forward a step and talk about some of your schoolday years, and whether there was any sort of influence there on your later interests in the environment?
  • BG: Yeah. Well there was no sense of environmental program in schools at that time, and certainly not in this kind of conservative area where it's just isn't natural to think in terms of environmental concerns, but it's one of those odd things that, I think, people shouldn't ever ignore.
  • I had a recurring nightmare when I was in about seventh grade or so, which would have been, I don't know, 63, 64, something like that, about sharks. And I'd always loved water. And I finally decided the way to work with this is we were supposed to do a science paper on some topic of our choosing, and I did mine on sharks.
  • And that's when I bumped into Jacques Cousteau and Frederic Dumas and learned that I wanted very much to learn how to scuba dive and all kinds of things.
  • And learned the difference between how you can feel about an animal, even an ominous one like sharks, and then you read more about it and you learn more about it, and you realize you need to separate reality from myth.
  • And so that was really seminal for me and that's purely one of those personal things that I think people just should nod to and and accept as it just something in your response to those things. And I my science teacher was completely puzzled, this young, seventh-grade girl was writing this thing on shark attacks, but whatever.
  • But, so that is, you know. And then when I went away to college, I went away to college to be a marine biologist, that was what my degree work was going to be in. I wanted to be in oceans, I cared very much about all of that.
  • And had the good fortune at the University of Texas in Austin to get to go down to the Galveston area and go out on one of the ships and found out that I have terminal seasickness, so that wasn't how I wanted to spend my life.
  • But, took a lot of science courses because that I started out in biology and I had a an ecology course in biology and this wouldve been like 69 or 70 that really made a huge difference, I think, for me because it was the first time I had formal information and training about looking at ecological issues in that in a little bit more powerful way.
  • And this professor was not a fan of nuclear power and I'm sure that's partly where I got that disinclination to have anything to do with this. He just always compared it to nuclear power is an absurd use, it's like using a cannon to swat a fly because its such a massive power source and a massive powerful thing that it's not an appropriate match to the job youre asking it to do. And that was that always struck me very well, too.
  • And then, in college, too, just your basic government course where you have a government professor that's smart enough to tell you that as exotic or as interesting or more riveting as federal politics might seem, the presidential race, that sort of thing, the government that will affect you the most is your local city and county government, and you should never forget that.
  • So education can teach you some things that you don't understand otherwise, or that at least plant those ideas. And from time to time, I've been very glad to see it, in recent years, well turn on the public television station here and bump into a course that Amarillo College has on for their continuing education, that people can use the television to attend the courses.
  • And I've learned some interesting things there, and I think how well done they are. So I wouldn't want anyone to underestimate those things at all.
  • DW: You mentioned where you were during the years '63 to '69. There was a lot happening in this country also at that time involving Vietnam, the war, and also at that time, about the time you're becoming a marine biologist, that's the time that Rachel Carson's book was coming out and I was wondering if any of these things were playing into your later decisions you've addressed to David. [Misc.]
  • BG: Boy, youre picky. That is I'm glad you, the book by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, that was one of the things that we read in this ecology course, and that was a powerful book to me. And you can just go into I tend to just go into a state of grief, I'm getting choked up now just thinking about it.
  • You worry about these things, and so much destruction. Can you edit this? Anyway, so I think you can probably see why I couldn't not do the work, because you just care so deeply. It's a a magical world and being used with such carelessness and thoughtlessness.
  • And I find it almost unbearable. As for, it was a tumultuous time. I will simply use as an example for people that being raised in this conservative area when I graduated from high school, I was not a liberal person.
  • I cared about ecological things, but I wasn't a liberal person and the big debate for me at that time was whether to go to college or go into the army.
  • And I was very patriotic in the standard ways and but I just I did decide on college and went down to the University of Texas at Austin and just by what I heard there, which you didnt hear here, or and I I didn't seek it out particularly as a high school student, completely changed how I felt about the Vietnam War or any of those other things.
  • And when I went to learn to scuba dive, another instance for for people just to to know you make these contacts. At UTA [University of Texas at Amarillo], I went to the scuba diving club and they were teaching lessons, and all the folks that were teaching us were Vietnam vets.
  • And one was missing a foot, and one had bullet holes across his chest, and one was a a man that had been in the underwater demolition work and things like that. And they felt differently about the war, but it was just how you you learned about these things and the prices that people were paying.
  • So, it was a tumultuous time, and I was I'm glad that I was in some of those marches and learned some of the things I learned. It simply struck me as true when I read some of the things that I had no idea of before.
  • Ho Chi Minh coming to visit, not visit, but feeling that the United States, of all countries, would understand their struggle for independence, and it breaks your heart to think when you think of all the things you want your country to be and what you feel, ideally, how it is in your heart and how you what you believe your country is, as opposed to what you begin to learn your country is and how it moves in the world.
  • I have had a lot of dreams for the United States, but one of my dreams was never that we would be arms merchant to the world. And that's one of the things we are. So as you learn those things, you either decide to I guess, to hide or if an opportunity comes your way, you say, I have to fight for what this country is supposed to be.
  • And that's you're fighting for the thing that it should be. And I think thats part of what always moved me to work on when the nuclear waste issue came up, so. But I didn't always live in Amarillo, I was raise born and raised here, but went away to college and when my got married, my husband and I lived in Portland, Oregon for a couple of years also.
  • And we only moved back to Amarillo in 1978. So I've lived here for since 1978. And it was in 1983 that the nuclear waste controversy where this country was going to store or dispose of or whatever term you want to use, where it was going to bury its high level, civilian nuclear waste.
  • The panhandle of Texas had two different counties that were on the list of sites that might be chosen. And I avoided going to some of the meetings because I just it was such bad news I I didn't really want to know, and I knew that if I went to some of the meetings, I might not ever get away. And that is what happened.
  • A friend finally said, we really need to go. And so Harry and I went with this other couple. And we went, and they didn't join and Harry and I did. And we wound up we've wound up working with STAND ever since, so. [Misc.]
  • DT: Before we get too far into the waste disposals issues, maybe you can just give us a little bit more background and conclude your story about being at University of Texas in the late sixties and where you might've been in 1970, in April, for Earth Day, if that was an event for you.
  • BG: Oh, it was. Earth Day, I was we were there. It was wonderful, it felt so hopeful. And it felt as if so many people cared that you might actually manage to rescue some of these things you cared about that you feel felt were in peril. It felt like the start of a movement and it was a it was a wonderful thing.
  • I can't remember where it was, precisely, on cam on campus, I suppose, I don't know. But it was just a celebration, and so. But that was that was wonderful to me. And when I graduated from college, I think I had this this, kind of, standard associations with the Sierra Club or that kind of thing that I maintained, but went into work.
  • I had shifted my majors by my major by then. It's a it's one of those wonderful, absurd things when youre working in a, kind of a, techni technical controversy, as nuclear waste or the Pantex facility can be. It always tickled me to see peoples reaction when my degree work is actually my degree, technically, is in French and my my minor was English.
  • And they're sort of so that should be an inspiration to a lot of people. You dont have to know all the science. You have to be willing to learn some of the technical stuff, but you don't have to be a scientist to take on these problems.
  • You just need to be a person who cares. And different talents come and play a a valuable role. You have to be able, sometimes, to be able to write about these things, to do a newsletter, to think clearly, to to whatever. So I wouldn't want anyone to let their gee, I'm not trained.
  • And you run into that. People just feel like they can't tackle the issues because they don't know enough or they don't know the right kind of things. I wouldn't want people to let that stop them.
  • The other piece of my background is that my father was raised in this area; his father was the Methodist minister. So he had, I think, both my parents had very strong standards and scruples of respect and care for things, that you don't you're not careless with things.
  • But, my father came being the one of seven children, wound up in Amarillo with $45 in his pocket. But my he and mother together eventually owned five shoe stores. And I worked all my life in those shoe stores, one way or another, gift-wrapping at Christmas or whatever.
  • So every time I went to apply for jobs after I graduated, since I wasn't really interested in being a teacher, I wound up in the business community. So in Portland, Oregon, where my husband and I lived while he did his residency in orthodontics, I worked for a large department store up there.
  • Then when it came time to decide where to move, we moved here because of my family's business. My father wasnt very well and I was the child that was kind of interested. I find business interesting. And so I came and gradually, was the general manager for all the five family stores. So it gave me a lot of pragmatic background.
  • I don't dislike business; I just don't think all businesses are scrupulously run. But when they are, it's a fine thing. So, it's a good kind of background to have. And it gave me a lot of credibility to tackle a controversial issue, and I did not look like what they like to paint the opposition as.
  • The powers that be that might want to push through some sort of project would really like for everyone to think that all of the folks on the other side are crazy and hippies and whatever you want to label them as. And it stood me in very good stead to have such a mainstream, pragmatic kind of background.
  • They basically couldn't make that label stick. And it was very useful. And I'm I'm proud of the diversity that I've done because it all applied. It gave me a lot more tolerance and a lot more patience, I think with people who didnt quite understand.
  • And I've had so much to learn myself. If you never forget how much you don't know, you'll be better off. And if you also are always able to remember when you were first learning, the misconceptions that you had or the how you felt about things when you were first learning, so that as you shift, if you can remember back to that, it helps you remember how to talk to people and how to be patient with them.
  • And how to start where they are, are opposed to starting too far up the ladder so that they can't even relate to what youre saying, so they can't get on board, in some way.
  • DT: Well, Beverly, you've discussed a little bit about your childhood and your education and some of your business background, and maybe you can help us jump right into your introduction to more full-time environmental work. And I think it began with this proposal to site high-level nuclear waste disposal site in the panhandle. Is that right?
  • BG: Yes, that's when I got involved with that. And it was not anything that anyone was anxious to do because it was controversial. But there was tremendously good leadership about it coming from Tulia, which is where the original STAND organization started and a man named Delbert Devin that was the head of that.
  • And also from other rural sites near where the site was going to be, was proposed in Deaf Smith County. Some groups called POWER and a woman named Tonya Kleuskens and the landowners around the site in Deaf Smith County that had been chosen.
  • So really, STAND of Amarillo formed a little bit later and I started working with it, but it was not a a fight that was being led by the city of Amarillo, particularly. It didn't have the same kind of planned movement and support behind it that we would see in later years on a different issue.
  • And those rural voices were excellent. The people were turning out for meetings, for these hearings that the Department of Energy would hold. It was a real learning process for me and what I noticed was the leadership capabilities of these people from smaller, more rural towns.
  • They were used to working in their churches, on the boards of their churches, in their schools, in their city in their town governments, in their county governments and things like that.
  • And they didn't feel the least bit that they had no right to be in this discussion, whereas the people who were coming here from the Department of Energy seemed to convey this aura of, you know, we're the federal government, we're more sophisticated, this needs to happen, you guys just have to accept it.
  • And it was such a revelation to me to watch these people simply feel that they had a right to participate in their society. And they did it really well. And Delbert Devin was as savvy as they ever would run up against any place. And one of the things he did, he went he traveled to Washington, D.C. and he watched he went to some of the hearings that Congress was holding on it on this whole issue.
  • And he noticed that there was a gentleman named Don Hancock who was a technical person that, when he testified before Congress, they never questioned his facts. And Delbert got with Don Hancock, who works with an outfit called Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico and asked Don if he he would be willing to be hired as STANDs technical consultant, and Don agreed.
  • And it was a powerful team. But so, I think the the things that worked so well as Delbert was a man who helped people understand they had a right to be in this conversation and that they should, in defense of the land and the water that they cared about. And he cared deeply about this agricultural land and water.
  • And others of us got involved because we couldn't believe the madness of of trying to dispose of nuclear waste in an area that is so agriculturally important. It is wildly absurd to endanger such a a tremendously important food producing area, with such limited water supplies and, as we learned more about the plans and looked at them, it was just we could not believe that you I guess some of us expected a higher level of of work, I guess, out of the federal government.
  • They were absolutely blasé about the fact that one of the sites that they chose in Deaf Smith County, that site, they would've had to drill through two groundwater aquifers. One of which was under artesian pressure and it had never been done anyplace in the world.
  • They were going to be using freeze ring drilling, it was called. And it had never been accomplished anywhere, it was quite new. But their answer to concerns were always, it will be it'll be fine, it'll work. You know, it really was just the, trust us, it's going to be fine.
  • So that was it was just you had to be able to fight some of that technical stuff, you had to be able to know that it hadn't been done anyplace yet, that it was being tested in Germany, but. So you have to be able to do the technical side of it, you need to be able to empower people that you should come, and you should speak at these hearings, and you don't have to talk about technical things, you just need to come and say, we care about this and this is not a wise choice for this irreplaceable kind of land and this agricultural area.
  • So people have to be encouraged to come in spite of the fact that they can't address technical issues, necessarily, but that their voices matter.
  • DT: Could you back up a little bit more and give us a little bit more information about what the reason for trying to find a high level radioactive waste disposal site was, and what the scope and scale of this project was? And where some of the other sites might have been?
  • BG: Yes.
  • DT: You know, for those who aren't familiar with that?
  • BG: I will do it with this one caveat of my memory is bound to be is really quite shaky for some of the details that I used to know so well because I just have let them slide out of my mind. But there was the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1983.
  • The nation had been, I will say, informally, or the Department of Energy had been looking for a disposal site in a not real organized, or a not public way, necessarily, before that Nuclear Waste Policy Act was established. When so when that Act was passed by Congress, the Department of Energy already had a list of sites it wanted to propose.
  • It was not, as the act described, that this country needs to go and look for and find what can be a long term storage site for civilian the power rods out of civilian nuclear reactors. So it wasn't it didn't have a clean start, it started out to working from work that had already been done that wasn't done in a way that was truly, I think, based on science as much as it was on politics.
  • Rural areas were targeted and the program wasn't well outlined. So in 1983, the DOE was able to immediately give Congress a list of seven or nine, I can't remember which it was, places and on that list of seven or nine potential sites, Swisher County in the panhandle of Texas and Deaf Smith County in the panhandle of Texas were both listed.
  • And two those are two tremendously powerful agricultural counties. The panhandle area of Texas, which is the top square part of the state. I'm sorry, I say that because I'm used to people who dont know Texas so wellaccounted, at that time, for like 25% of the states cash receipts for crops and livestock.
  • And it is not 25% of the physical area of the state, as you know. It is such valuable land and water up here, such an irreplaceable commodity, which people who are involved in environmental things recognize but other folks, the Department of Energy people and the some of the people who were doing their work, came up here and just portrayed it as almost a desert.
  • And rural and wasteland, and it was just astonishing to me. You would watch their PR film that they would send around to civic groups for meetings and things like that, and I loved it.
  • At the Deaf Smith site in particular, they photographed a bar ditch, which is, of course, grown up in grasses and weeds and things like that and the soundtrack in the background as they showed this site where this waste could go didn't show farmhouses around, didn't show seed farms around, didn't show that kind of thing, in the background is the sound of wind (wind noises).
  • You just go, this is so bogus, it has nothing to do with what this area should be valued for and what this country's going to need from this area in the future when food food producing lands are a valuable thing, that we don't feel yet, but people who know environmental things knew very well in the future we would regret if we ever destroyed this, and destroyed the water resource under it.
  • So, and I've I've gotten lost a little bit here and I'm not sure, but thats the kind of portrayal the Department of Energy was doing almost immediately.
  • DT: And there was a pattern to this, the other sites that were identified in the original list were similarly isolated, rural.
  • BG: Tended to be. DT: Not as politically powerful?
  • BG: And they they narrowed the list down immediately and all of the sudden you found that no site east of the Mississippi stayed on the list. And there was one up in, I'm going to say Maine, or Vermont, a grana site in granite.
  • But you kept running into the problem of, if it's too near too many people, it wasnt going to stay there. The politics entered into it. Political pressure could be brought to bear very differently than a a rural site that couldn't get its state senators behind it or it's state congressional folks behind it particularly.
  • DT: So you think that decision to stay away from populated areas was more of a result of there being a lot of votes in those areas that probably turned down any kind of a
  • BG: Absolutely.
  • DT: Rather than, there are a lot of people who might be exposed, might be hurt?
  • BG: Absolutely. And you're always faced with the they tell you to it will be safe, we will do it right, and then when you look at the details in the plans, as much as you could find out about them, you find out that there will be emissions, there will be transportation, the waste is not only radioactively hot, it is hot with temperature.
  • And we went for two or three years unable to get the fac kind of the more concrete details of exactly how they would do this, you were trapped in the generalities of things.
  • And so they were out they always used the words, what we could do, what we may do, what we might do, you could until you begin to pin them down and get concrete plans from them, you can't really fight against the fact that they say, whatever needs to be done is what we will do. We will make it right. And so it makes it very hard, people tend to trust and they say, well well, they won't intentionally do it wrong.
  • And so it can be hard to generate people to fight the fight and get the public support that you need in some ways. Because people have their their boxing with a a shadow, it's not concrete enough, so you can't have your people say, realistically, gentlemen, concrete is not impermeable to water.
  • There will be water migration. So you and then as the more concrete plans came out and you say they were planning to use concrete, it wasn't lined, as you raised those issues as an organization and made your comments, the next rendition of the plans you would see would say that it was going to be lined.
  • So you make a difference, but it's not the kind of difference that makes you, sort of, able to get people to go stand up and cheer and look at what we did. You have this quiet impact that you improve the plans and you improve what they say they will do and you begin to have a little bit more it's a it's a two-edged sword. The more you improve the plans and make them where they would be better, you make it more possible for them to go forward also, but.
  • DT: Speaking of the plan, can you explain why, I mean, it sounds like the idea of storing these radioactive fuel rods on site, at the power stations where they originally had been irradiated was dismissed out of hand, and the thought was always to get them offsite, despite the problems of finding new sites and transportation. Is that fair to say?
  • BG: Certainly on the part of industry and the Department of Energy, absolutely fair to say. But that was one of things for citizens to raise also. That you can that we have a nuclear waste disposal program that is going to cause future generations unknown amounts of harm and trouble and that we have got to do this right if we are going to do it.
  • And we can buy time to do that; this is what citizens groups held up. We can buy time to do that by storing these things on site, and it can be done and it can be done safely. We can look at dry cask storage, we can look at different methods of doing it, so that we do this right, if it is indeed the correct answer.
  • But there were a lot of people who weren't at all convinced it was the correct answer. And certainly not, necessarily, the correct places that had been targeted for it, especially after the list was narrowed down to three. And one was Deaf Smith County in Texas, one was Yucca Mountain in Nevada and one was Hanford, Washington.
  • And none of those sites, not one of them, was a good site. They all were jeopardized in one way or another. And that is one of the things you learned, too. The criteria laid out for what this country was looking for, in terms of to be a good repository, you need to find certain things geologically.
  • You needed to have, if you if it is a site such as we would've had here, you need to have a contiguous geology that doesn't have a lot of fractures, doesn't have clay interbeds, so that if when your canisters break down and and they begin to leak and water begins to cause the material to migrate, it won't hit a ledge or a crack or something like that and run far more quickly that we predicted it would run so that it gets to a a groundwater source or goes off-site more quickly than they planned for it.
  • Well, what we found here is, number one, what so few people know is we wound up on the list of the last three sites to be considered, Deaf Smith County, and they had never done a single test hole on that site itself. And yet, we hit the the last one of the top three list's places that should be used.
  • And it's because the landowners wouldn't allow them on their land those landowners were a joy and a pleasure, I mean, those folks fought the fight. They gave money to hire the technical experts; they worked in their communities. They one was Richardsons Seed Farm, a very valuable, well-respected seed farm that Texas AandM University would send up it's some of its strains of foundation wheat seeds that they had generated for Richardson Seed Farm to grow and propagate because they ran their business so well.
  • And because in this area, Johnson grass doesn't thrive so well, and Johnson grass will interbreed with wheat, so you need seed production farms in a place that your seed comes out more pure and it doesn't have interference of Johnson grass and that in it genetically and that kind of thing.
  • And the one the place that they wanted to put this site in Deaf Smith County would've taken the water wells that Richardsons Seed Farm needed. It didn't take all of Richardsons Seed Farm; it just would've taken their water wells because this was going to be a heavy water user for cooling because these rods are so hot.
  • So it's it's I'm I'm sorry, its so hard not to just, sort of, go from thing to thing but you learn these things as you got into the to reading the documents or helv having someone technical help you know those things. And you can see, I'm doing right now the very thing that is so hard for the public to deal with, too much, I think, technical information in a confusing way.
  • Some people respond to technical information and that's what makes them have the confidence to join or to speak out. Other people, you need to help them stand up for this land is too valuable to be used as a waste dump for this kind of material and that they simply speak to the fact that it's a bad match.
  • It shouldnt be done in a place like this; it's too destructive of something that this country can't afford to lose.
  • DT: Is that the gist of the argument that was often made was that the land was too valuable, that the food that was produced, or the seed that was produced. Did they ever make the argument that the public health of the people in this area could be affected and that's too great a risk?
  • BG: Yes, but, you know, the emissions were not well known and I think and I we knew there would be emissions from it, but that is so that is so hard an argument to prove, you can't prove it. All you can say is, people would be better off without being near these emissions.
  • But they would cite wind speeds and distance to the nearest farm and dispersion and all those things and they can just begin to make people feel silly that they're even worried about that. You get more from a chest x-ray, all those kinds of things, that you have to have someone help you sort the sheep from the goats, from what's a real technical argument and what's not.
  • And, so that was part of it, too. I will say another interesting thing about the Department of Energy at this time, though, is that they were very they were arrogant in how they moved with people. And they they treated people as, well, it really doesn't matter what you want, the nation needs this and were going to do it.
  • And, of course, some of us were saying, it isn't so much the nation needs this, the nuclear industry needs this and this is in the service of the industry, this is not in the service of the country.
  • But they were very autocratic and very offensive and people before some of the Department of Energy people moved away, there were folks at at the meetings who had had enough of this arrogance and they just said, well, I just think you ought to be careful as you're driving from Canyon into Hereford to work. It'd be a shame if your tires got shot out, or something like that.
  • I mean, they were being physically threatened, which kind of, being a more urban person, I was startled by and I wasn't sure how I felt about that. But I have to say, those people earned some of that kind of comment from folks. They treated folks as if they were rural rubes and rednecks and all that kind of stuff and so finally some of the people just gave them, well, if that's what you think, we may just prove it to you.
  • And they began to really, I think, be worried that something physical might happen to them and that was I dontI still don't know how I feel about that whole dynamic. I do know, unfortunately, that that dynamic made a difference.
  • I really think it did. It made those people feel as intimidated as perhaps they had made us feel. And I had thought if nothing else, I did think it was fair that they felt some intimidation, instead of feeling so smug and so sophisticated and they're the scientists.
  • For once, they were having to feel some of the heat of being treated in a way that made them feel vulnerable. And I thought it was probably a good lesson for them. But I still don't I mean, it's not anything that I would ever lead or do, but it was people's right to feel that way and to say it in a public meeting if thats what they chose to say.
  • And it was interesting to watch that dynamic. In later years, the Department of Energy sent its people to charm school, and they didn't make those kinds of mistakes in the same way. But it was an interesting dynamic.
  • DT: Was the Department of Energy the main proponent of these sites or was the nuclear utility industry involved either in the background or on the frontline?
  • BG: I think the nuclear industry's role was just to keep pushing the Department to get a site. You've got to take this off our hands because as soon most people don't realize that the nuclear industry's liability for these wastes ends when the federal government takes it off their hands.
  • And so they will no longer be responsible for it. And that's why the industry is so determined to see that it shifts hands into thethe federal government's hand.
  • Nuclear power has been so subsidized in terms of coverage, limited liability if they have an accident and the waste being an obligation that the federal government took on, that it really is an industry that has not it's playing tennis with the nets down.
  • It's not responsible for the full life cycle of what it uses and what it creates and what it does. And if it looks profitable on paper, it's only at the expense of the public. So.
  • DT: Why do you think the net is down?
  • BG: Because they aren't having to be responsible for fully responsible for accidents which they might have. The federal government will pick up all liability over a certain amount, the Price-Anderson Act saw to that. And because they don't have to be responsible for the cost of dealing with their waste.
  • And so it's essentially like having had two of the industry's biggest liabilities taken off their shoulders. And so that's why I say they're playing tennis with the nets down. It's an easier game for them because their two of their biggest challenges that would've defeated, I think, nuclear power in this country as being a viable energy source, were taken off their shoulders and assumed by the government.
  • DT: Why do you think the government decided to let the net down and subsidize the industry so heavily?
  • BG: Do you know, I don't know that history well; I think they just this was this is I don't remember well what people used to say. The arguments are frequently, I think, that we needed the energy source. I think people wanted to see peaceful things done with things nuclear instead of just weaponry done with it.
  • And I think they were just such dreams, you know, the old spiel of we'll have energy so cheap you wont even need to meter it. It seemed like an incredible blessing and a boon if it could happen and be true. It's never transpired that way, but. But, the how the industry lobbied to get those things, how Congress was persuaded to do those things, I don't know that history well and someone should read that history to to understand that.
  • DT: To talk about the issue here locally, you've told us a little bit about the promoters in the Department of Energy and some of the opponents. I'm a little unclear if there was a regulator involved or was the Department of Energy both the promoter and the regulator?
  • BG: Well, civilian nuclear waste would be, I think, under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
  • I'm sorry, I've really forgotten that whole dynamic there. But the search for a site was in the hands of the Department of Energy. Then when a site would be permitted, that permitting process would've pulled in, perhaps, the NRC and certainly, I would say, the state wherever it's located, to one degree or another.
  • So there would be a permitting process that would that would then go into effect. But locating the site and creating the plans and all that sort of stuff, until it washad actually been permitted by a state, or the NRC, if it would've had part in a part of that, then it was in the hands of the Department of Energy to get it that far until those other entities kicked in.
  • DT: I guess the way it played out between the proponents of the site and the opponents, you gave a few reasons why it was ultimately defeated, can you expand a little bit on why they were ultimately successful in dissuading the DOE from pursuing the panhandle site?
  • BG: It was pure politics.
  • It was pure political maneuvering that Yucca Mountain got it was a political decision to focus on one site only and Yucca Mountain was that site. And at the time, Texas had Jim Wright in the House of Representatives. Delbert Devin and STAND, the STAND organizations, had raised money to hire a lobbyist who was very good.
  • He, as a matter of fact, was one of the farmers that went to Washington, D.C. in the tractorcade, when farmers went driving their tractors to Washington, D.C.? You do you remember that you don't remember that? And he stayed and became a lobbyist. And he was excellent.
  • He was he was great, he was a good storyteller, a good poker player, a good all that kind of stuff. And he was energetic and active and personable and he was a lobbyist. And Delbert Devin was there with Don Hancock, this lobbyist whose name I can't remember, and I'm sorry, but Tonya Kleuskens probably will.
  • And going with Jim Wright and following the Congressional meetings. They were in Washington, D.C. talking to people, persuading them about why this would be such a bad site, all that kind of stuff, as all this political maneuvering was going on, those people were there.
  • DT: Was Jim Wright speaker at the time?
  • BG: Uh-huh, I think so. And so when Congress found itself in a bind with this kind of controversial issue and needed to break the deadlock and push it forward somehow, the political decision was, we'll go forward with one site only because the price tag for this thing is just astronomical. And Yucca Mountain was chosen because it had less political influence. It was pure politics.
  • DT: Not a geologic
  • BG: It's a bad site, it is a bad site. It's a bad site. And it will, I absolutely am utterly convinced, future generations will pay a really high price if that site is opened and used. But the state of Nevada, interestingly though, they didnt have the political clout to stop this process in D.C.
  • The state of Nevada has fought this fight to keep that site from opening far better than Texas ever would've given the subsequent governors that we had and that kind of thing. If it had if they had chosen Deaf Smith County, I bet you that site would be up and running already because the state of Texas, the subsequent governors and all that kind of stuff wouldn't have fought it in the same way.
  • Nevada's done a great job of pointing out the flaws of this, and they have STAND committed to not being this political choice which justit just targeted Nevada. And it wasn't based on science like it said it was supposed to be so.
  • That's an interesting twist of what seemed like such a raw deal for Nevada at the time, and I could hardly even rejoice that the decis that we were off the hook.
  • And as a matter of fact, we kept STAND operating in a kind of an explore energy issues, meet once a quarter, or monthly when we had a program sort of way, because we were so sure that nuclear things would crop up again. We didn't let the organization disappear. We kept it up and running, even in in a much quieter way, more as a study group almost.
  • Because we knew we were going to have to deal with nuclear stuff again, we didn't doubt it one bit. But, as I said, what looked like such a bad deal for Nevada at the time was probably a blessing for the country because, as a state, they have fended it off so much better than Texas would have.
  • DW: Well, that leads me to a question which is, I think we face this dilemma in all these instances. If not our place, it's going to be some other place. And they work that guilt on you. If were not going to have (?) it does mean foisting it someplace else.
  • I was wondering how you dealt with in your group or with each other that that moral thing, well, it's not going to be here but I mean, you can pray for the Nevadans, you can send money, you can do an alliance, but morally and ethically, this nuclear thing is always somewhere else and its never good for anyone.
  • And I know in our group, we have divisions, well, if we don't get it here, were going to have to send it to Yucca Mountain and we've got to stand by them, too. It's sort of like, there's no place to send it and how do you keep that from driving you nuts?
  • BG: But you always remind people that that's a very real quandary. And it's a very accurate reflection of nuclear power. That it drives drives you into these, kind of, I was about to say desperate choices, these unattractiveand
  • DT: (inaudible)
  • BG: Yeah. And it is it is bigger in nuclear power, because of the nature of that kind of power, than it is in anything else. It's a nasty industry, that we should find other ways to get our energy than that. But STAND dealt with that, in part, we never, ever said any of the sites were good.
  • We said just what I said here, none of these sites are any good. This process should start over and it should be done in a it really should honor the science and technical issues. It's going to cause trouble no matter what, but at least, we could choose a better site than any of these that are left on this list.
  • They are none of them fit for the job they are being asked to do. We would and so we always said that and we always pointed to the fact that this industry needs to take care of its waste in a different way instead of one region gathering all the good and extracting all of the good and then sending its waste somewhere else.
  • That is unacceptable. And as for it'll be safe, if it's going to be safe wherever they do it, then they need to do it at the power plant site. But you have to have some sympathy for the power plant communities that probably had very little say in whether or not those power plants were established there.
  • That was a juggernaut of its own type also, I'm sure. And that they were always promised that the waste would go away. And so you find those communities confronted with the fact of they were they were, kind of, got on board with this power source because they knew that the waste wasnt going to live there forever.
  • And now you have someone so it's it I mean, its just you've been set up the whole way. And so no one is I I'm not really angry at the communities that dont want to have it there, but I am disgusted withthe industry who is so willing to foist these things off and pat itself on the back as a clean industry when it is anything but.
  • And it does not blink its eye one bit, the industry or the Department of Energy, at fracturing communities and polarizing them into people who are for it or for or who are against it. They don't care one bit, only they only care that they win, they don't care what theyve done to the fabric of the communities where they've caused these conversations to go forward, these arguments.
  • DT: Can you talk about some of the schisms that you saw in Amarillo or in Tulia or Hereford over whether the site should come or not?
  • BG: Well, I think in the small towns in particular, Hereford, I know and but Tonya Kleuskens is the person to really talk to. She lived it with her group and her people who fought with it.
  • But I would say that it was a it's a what a town of 45, 40, 50,000 I dont know what it was then, that's why I'm hesitating over the figure. That I don't think withstands that kind of schism easily.
  • And so you had the Chamber of Commerce, sort of booster types, wanting it, wanting it for the jobs, wanting all that kind of thing. And painting the other folks who don't want it as being backward and hysterical and exaggerating and preying on peoples fears and all that kind of stuff.
  • And it just it fractures communities, it is such there are such hard arguments and such hard things are said, and such unpleasant accusations get made that you have to it's very hard.
  • A lot of people come away very embittered by the conversations. It's hard to heal those kinds of rifts and ever want to work you don't work as comfortably again in your community with those people for maybe a joint goal again. It just it just creates rifts. But you should ask her more about that.
  • It affected Amarillo less because we were not so much on the firing line and we are a bigger city. And there was not, at that time, as serious a push backing this effort as there would be later when the city of Amarillo decided to back expansion of Pantex, the nuclear weapons facility.
  • That was very different. But for the nuclear waste issue, Amarillo as a city wasnt really galvanized to back it. It was a little bit distasteful, wasn't it? People had a hard time saying that they wanted to be a a waste site. It's a little bit less pleasant to tell people, you should stand up and want this waste.
  • It just doesn't fly as well. People are sort of going, I don't think so, even if they don't stand up and say it real loud, people have a lot of common sense that you can always depend on, and frankly, being a waste dump site for waste that was generated mostly east of the Mississippi River just doesnt appeal to us all that much.
  • You know, you ran into that dynamic, too. East versus west, rural areas versus urban areas. A lot of that, we don't take kindly to having to take the waste for big cities. And so it was harder for Amarillo to feel like it ought to really try to get the city behind being a waste dump.
  • We ought to want that in the panhandle. It just didn't happen the same way, so. But in smaller towns that are in rural towns that are so desperate for jobs and so much of the social fabric and the economic fabric in this country is causing people to concentrate in metropolitan areas and family farmsfarms are getting bigger and bigger run by fewer people, so your ur rural areas are becoming depopulated.
  • Those towns are having such a hard time staying alive that it makes them so vulnerable to all of these projects that offer some degree of jobs to help these towns stay alive. And it's an ugly dynamic, it it sets them up for taking things that the bigger cities don't want. You didn't see Dallas and Austin and places like that signing up to be a waste dump.
  • You didn't see them offering and saying, we want the jobs. You saw desperate, rural areas trying to stay alive be willing to take on these kinds of projects. Or have, at least, a certain segment of their population being willing to take it on.
  • Especially when it's wrapped in, it's going to be technically well done, all that kind of thing. Then that that makes it easier for people to be suckered into it. So.
  • DW: How do you feel about it when they say its going to be technically well done? Hasn't it become just a battle of our scientist versus your scientist? Our paid expert versus your paid expert? And how do you win that kind of an argument with battling the bureaucracy?
  • BG: Well, you, as an organization STAND always made as sure as it could that its facts were absolutely accurate so that no one could ever hold up anything that we ever gave to our members or gave to the press and could say, they're absolutely wrong about this. So you do that piece of it.
  • I will tell you one of the dark sides of this work that I had to learn doing this is that you find that you have technical people who will not, even though they agree with you and will tell you off the record it's a bad idea or the plans are not good enough.
  • They will not lightly become a technical expert for a citizens group because their reputation will be trashed in their own industry by how the Department of Energy will move with it. Technical people, they can find their careers, their reputations just absolutely undermined by their work being undercut by the battle of the experts and that kind of thing.
  • And so you it's awe ran into, quite a few times, it's hard to find technical experts thatthat want to take on the fight and will take on that risk.
  • DT: And the fear is that they will lose commercial consulting contracts or do they lose funding from NSF?
  • BG: They'd lose and they'd lose their scientific credibility. Their stuff would be so mauled, I guess is a good word, by the experts from the department or whoever they choose to hire.
  • The the people who are for hire by the industry, that kind of stuff, that their credibility as a scientist, as a reputable scientist, just gets destroyed. And so, it's hard for citizens groups to find people who will always sometimes do that work. And you also, at that time, I learned the power of industry funding of university research.
  • And you have industry with such big grants going to universities and their research departments of various types that you find that those professors don't want to put at risk their grants.
  • And so you find universities unwilling to take on some of these things that you would expect them to take on so that you have an independent voice. But it influences what universities are willing to take on also. And so you ran into that dynamic. It's an ugly fight.
  • DT: When did you find that some of these people who might be likely experts for public interest groups like STAND had been prophylactically hired by the commercial side, the DOE, in order to limit their availability to public interest groups?
  • BG: Yes, absolutely you find that. I would say you find that when the Department of Energy goes into a town, that they don't have one law firm they work with. I bet you they have work that they have out with all kinds of law firms in that town.
  • I know that's thecertainly the case, beyond any doubt, in Amarillo with Pantex. I didn't have occasion to run into that for the nuclear waste thing. But I wouldn't doubt it at all. So all of a sudden, if you need a lawyer, you cant even find a law firm that doesn't have a conconflict of interest.
  • And you do find that they they go to the universities and ask the universities to do somesome of of this work and that kind of thing. But what you find is that you always have to follow the money. And you you have to know that the money influences findings. Whether people wish for it to or not.
  • Even if it's only to the extent that they soft-pedal or try to be so judicious about their criticisms, they simply don't speak the truth within as direct a way. They they will be far more cautious how they will state criticisms and so it's not as clear to people. So. Yes.
  • DT: Did you ever find that there's a part of professional character of scientists and engineers to mute what they say and try to be very careful to be balanced and objective because they didn't have the full confidence, they didn't have the statistical grounds to say, with no doubt, that there was complete certainty that such and such was true.
  • BG: Right.
  • DT: I mean, aside from the money issues, there was just an ingrained side to their character; they were just unwilling to say things outright.
  • BG: Right, if you can't prove it. And one of the things that citizens are susceptible to is that you can't get someone to say this sort of thing will give you these kinds of health effects if you have those exposures of a certain type.
  • It just it doesn't follow that way. And we don't have the statistical proof yet. What you do find, and what's helpful sometimes was to educate people about how little we actually know and so you should move more cautiously than people are saying you should move because we know so little.
  • And that, in terms of health effects, is particularly true for any exposures to radiation that you have, or to radio material radioactive materials. We just don't know. And the only way youll finally know is that you keep enough records and you track the array of health effects, not just the cancer deaths, not just cancer.
  • Health effects happen in terms of just diminishment of your quality of life. Do you have child that all of a sudden has nosebleeds a lot? Or has some they just don't feel good. Health effects take such a variety of shapes and forms and peopleits one of the hardest things that I had to kind of learn.
  • I was looking for more certainty and it just isn't there. And the health effects can be laid off onto a zillion other things; you can't pinpoint them as associated with this particular exposure or that kind kind of thing. And so it's a very murky world, and you can't get people to say clear enough things because they don'thave the facts to do so.
  • And then the downside is, if we ever do finally have enough facts to say things truly clearly, we have hurt a lot of people, and were closing the door after the horse has already gone. And it's hard for people to understand that. You won't be able to prove health effects until you have good record keeping, which isn't happening, and they do tend to thwart that.
  • And by that time, you've cost a lot of people their health if not their lives. And it's a a tragic price to pay and not a necessary price to pay. One other thing about the and I'm thethe not in my backyard argument, which is so powerful, it feels so powerful.
  • And I puzzled over that one for kind of a long time. And as I said, STAND simply made it a point not to target any other place, but to point out what this program, if it goes forward, should be based on and how it should be done.
  • But another piece to the not in my backyard accusation is they promise you that these things will be well done, that they will be state of the art, that they will whatever and every time I've ever watched one of these things, the plans get laid out. When they come up with their final plans, it is a robust building of a whatever sort and a, you know, x amount this, that and the other.
  • And what you find is that it is so expensive and the price is so high that that it gets mitigated, it gets downgraded, and so it simply doesn't come true. And what I think people should always remember to say when theyre confronted with the not in my backyard is that that is only half of the argument.
  • And it iswhat you never hear people say, is that, all right, if we are responsible for taking on this work on behalf of the entire nation, if we are obliged to do that, on behalf of the health and well-being of this nation, than what is the nation's commitment to us. That this thing is done perfectly well, as well as we can do it. That we are given every fighting chance to survive this project, that were not destroyed by doing this work.
  • And that is not what happens. What happens is the price tag gets too high and the project starts being done in a less robust way and these areas get put at risk. So, at the very least, people who are confronted with not in my backyard is, okay, if we are obliged, what is your equal obligation to us.
  • How are you going to help us survive this work? If we take it on, how do you make it where we survive it? That you dont destroy us doing this work. And thats the other piece of the argument you never hear. They dont talk about it. So. [Misc.] [End of Reel 2215]