NUCLEAR ANIMALS AND AN ATOMIC RESTORATION: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE HANFORD  NUCLEAR SITE

David C. Bolingbroke

Abstract by David Cleve Bolingbroke PH.D. Washington State University December 2020 Chair: Jeffrey C. Sanders This dissertation focuses on the Cold War Era biologists and ecologists who monitored and tested nuclear animals at central Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Site, the place that produced plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. It tells stories about familiar food animals like salmon, livestock, and tuna and reveals the seemingly unlikely radioactive narratives of alligators, beagle dogs, and elk. It also describes the culture that developed among certain human animals, nuclear biologists, who worked closely with nature and nuclear isotopes. My argument is that animals are crucial to understanding Cold War science, postwar ecological risks, and the conservation efforts that flowed from them. It is significant because in an age where animals often symbolize an idyllic natural history or a domestic companion, we need to remember that like us humans, they have an atomic context. The rise of nuclear energy in the postwar era fundamentally affected their lives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Chapter Two focuses on how like local wildlife, Hanford’s creation during the mid-1940s depended on water from the Columbia River. Chapter Three describes Pacific Northwest biologists’ efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to study and track the spread of radioactive isotopes in salmon and waterfowl. Chapter Four argues that this scientific process extended far beyond Hanford’s borders and played a significant role in national and global fallout controversies of the 1950s and 1960s. Chapter Five takes a different angle in addressing how radiation affected humans. It looks at how Cold War Era Hanford biologists developed a distinct culture from working intimately in a hybrid nuclear and natural environment. Chapter Six examines the dog testing program operating at Hanford in the 1960s and 1970s and compares it to the treatment of endangered wild bald eagles that wintered along the Columbia River. Chapter Seven explains the story of Hanford’s long-time elk herd that migrated onto Hanford in the 1970s and began to grow. Over time, they became a symbol of the wild and pristine place the Department of Energy sought to restore at Hanford.

NUCLEAR ANIMALS AND AN ATOMIC RESTORATION: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE HANFORD NUCLEAR SITE

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