Environmental Scientist Ed Landa Explores History

[00:00:00]it's it's my great pleasure to introduce Dr Ed Landa today um I you know the title of this talk is doing history as an environmental scientist and I think uh you know in that vein it's it's kind of nice to know a little bit of history about the speaker so um I'm not sure if if Ed grew up in New York uh but but got his bachelor's degree from City College in New York um got a a degree in geology and then went on to the university of Minnesota for a masters in PhD in uh soil science and did some really great work that resonates with me uh for his Masters and PhD on everything from Iron oxy hydroxides and um how they how they function in environmental systems and then studying things like uh Radioactive byproducts like technum 99 OR technician 99 H um and then I think also if I'm not mistaken you a postto for a while like oakd National Lab Oregon State okay Oregon State but didn't you work at oakd National or had some connection with sorry I thought at one point we talked about okay but in um in recent years uh Ed's got a lot a lot of recognition with his work at the US Geological Survey and then he's also an adun faculty and our department ofg um and so also Ed is has also um does a lot with Scholarships in our department um the he he works with manners but you know most notably I think the the Landa Johnson scholarship for juniors and seniors who are pursuing a degree in NST as as a contributor that so um with that Ed I'll give it away to you [Applause] it's really nice to be here today so thank you Jared um okay so what I want to talk about is um doing history as an environmental scientist not as a historian because none of us in this room are probably historians so this is the kind of thing you learn on the fly so I would like to share with you some of my learning curve and I'm not sure where I'm at on that curve right now but someplace uh sorry I think Jonathan was Ming with zoom so if we click okay so some of the elements of of my talk today um storytelling something that when I was in grad school we never talked about storytelling and now we talk about it a lot which I think is a great thing um we're going to talk about science and technology about chronology um we're going to talk about the Oppenheimer movie because it's really Central to what I'm working on um a personal narrative in terms of uh my path on historical work and with elements which I hope will be a career pep talk on um things that you may want to think about folding in to your careers as it progresses so first I want to talk about the the end St family so I am not the only person um doing history here and there's three of us that I will highlight and this I think is is a given for all of us the um you don't go out and find the topics the topics find you if you're a historian you go looking for topics we take these things on as sort of add-ons to what we're typically doing because they grab our attention or in some cases because we're working say for a consulting company where there's forensic um issues involved like determining prior Legacy contamination at a site so those are two places where history comes in okay so the first person is Bob Jaden uh in 2020 Bob uh publish this book on um the history of Forestry in in Delaware and um Bob and I both were working at the Delaware Public archive um essentially at the same time um during preco and covid times um Pat Kangas 20022 this um history of radio ecology uh really a terrific book um it really shows the um the roots of Martin ecology are heavily based within radio ecology mainly because of funding after World War II there was a tremendous need to establish um environmental Pathways of radio nuclei um radiation biology studies so this was really one of the drivers of the modern field of ecology so the table one um 1.1 the book I loved because one of my interests besides so Science History is moving so here's this thing movies horror movies from the 1954-57 era that had to do with radiation effects and just because this predates almost every one of the students I'm sure I'm going to give you the summary of these for me go Godzilla was formative in my life um so Godzilla is is radiation in Japan very much focused on the hero Nagasaki um um the my favorite here is really the last one attack of the Crab Monsters and I thought in terms of a Maryland based institution we should throw some Old Bay in some I added some to the slide there but these movies every one of these the creature was a mutation from environmental radioactivity so them uh was up there with God from 1954 um and so it it resonated with me later in my career because um I did this U this study um on ant mounds in Oregon in 19 uh um 1977 so I found these these bizarre like kni cylindrical ant mounds I wind up writing it up for an entomology journal and um so then later in my career 2015 this is my movie interest came in and I wrote a chapter on phase four which is a really underrated movie so if you ever get to see it I recommend it um it was the only movie ever made by this guy Saul bass whose major claim to fame was he did the the opening titles on many of the this the big blockbuster movies in Hollywood psycho and movies like that uh but he only got to make one movie and this was it and so this is um Saul bass's columns they were beautiful they were very micacious and the sun would glint off them and there's my U mini version so thank you Saul so change over time is historians talk about this all the time and when I heard this I said well you know that's what we talk about all the time also right how how things change over time most of our graphs are along these lines so I just wanted to show you the history timeline and my uh episodic intersections with it so this thing about with the topics find you the model I like to use it's like an EKG it doesn't run it's not a continuous wave it's uh there's spikes long periods another Spike and that's these topics will hit you they either interest you or they don't you pay no attention some attention or lots of attention and that's I think for most of us this is how we get involved in projects like the ones I'll describ so um so you see there uh Pierre and Marie curri this is um pre-1939 so everything changes in 1939 with the discovery of nuclear fion and the uh curve I have there those are called the the uh fision yield curves so there're always this bodal distribution and um one mass is always around 100 and one is always around 140 so when you think about it uranium 238 is 100 plus 140 about right so that's that the fision fragments tend to fall along that um those Mass numbers so for for my pH work I worked on technum 99 in other words on the first Peak there um I've also done some work on cesium 137 that's on the second Peak okay yeah so um so then in 1945 per the Oppenheimer movie we had the Trinity test and then two uh detonations in Japan and then many many detonations in either the Pacific or Nevada a test site as well as the Russians doing similar testing uh in Siberia so um that's one source of environmental radi activity Fallout and that's what really drove um the stuff that Pat Kangas was looking at that the Fallout issue so um the Fig the picture in the middle that's at Chernobyl so in 1991 I was there with a group from the iaea the international atomic energy a agency and we were looking at mostly Vision products cium 137 being the major one so it was 5 years after the accident so the radiation levels there was really no external exposure issues but that building in the back that's the monolith uh not like the monoliths we have in HJ Patterson that was the structure they built over the crippled reactor and that's me taking some Cor samples uh so the um my work with the USGS as I described was mostly on uranium mil tailings and I'll get into what that is but the the very last thing here is the current hot thing in um radioactivity really medical radioisotopes um mostly for cancer therapy and these are specifically tied to radium 226 and I'll get into that more okay so my um that's one of my major interests my other one um involves work with Paul on mosquitoes so when I came here in 2010 U Bruce James introduced me to Paul right outside that door there and we we started talking about our mutual interest in tires and not tires for our cars but scrap tires disposed tires and tires of habitat from mosquitoes so we uh uh my previous work had been on tire wear particles it's the little pieces of tire that are sprayed all over the road as you drive and back then no one really was paying much attention to them and they certainly did not class them as microplastics but now they are grouped in with microplastics and they're the biggest source from what I read of microplastics on on a weight basis so they're getting more public attention so in 2010 so I actually can't remember exactly how this hit me but I was looking at something and I realized that I came across this thing about uh ditching of salt marshes and about the same time I had been playing with Google Maps and I saw these things that looked like they must be man-made features so I between pitting those two team together these grid-like patterns and the historical record I decided this is pretty interesting um so I started working at the Delaware public archives which has a tremendous collection on M on the mosquito ditching that was done in the 1930s um and um so Paul and I hoping to put something together where we combine the history with um the good and the bad of of ditching into some kind of uh paper with you know hopefully not uh uh it could be a journal article but also something with more um Outreach to a broader audience because I think there is an audience for this okay so a little more on history so the the subject of context if you just skim through that wording at the bottom historians like to talk about context and if you're not a historian it's an area where I think we don't have a lot of strength I certainly didn't and I was um um I will give you one example so the technician 99 I worked on was um most of it came from defense was this was in U 1972 to 75 I was working on this I did not realize that that was mostly defense related waste meaning bomb production till I'm embarrassed to say decades later then all of a sudden I real you know wait a minute I looked at a curve of nuclear energy there was very little nuclear power plant production in the early '70s it was just barely getting started so there tremendous volume of waste had been built up from weapons production so the the reason we got funded was undoubtedly due to the defense waste not not the nuclear power industry but um so that's the context you know knowing what was going on in the world was where we had peace War blah blah blah and um context is something that historians will they immediately gravitate to that so um in 2003 I um for health physics journal I reviewed this book and this was really providing the contextual basis of uranium mil tailings um management which I had been working on let's see at that point for um 23 years maybe and this was a real eye opener for me all the the political historical backgr and legal the legal background on this so like I said this is episodic we're not experts at the beginning it's it's bi osmosis mostly so this is my I trying to think of what is a good example of context so the three little pigs one so the Three Little Pig story we would tell is you know um the uh wolf confronted the pigs and said I will huff and puff and blow your house down but the context would be there was a housing shortage the wolves are an endangered species and exposure to PM 2.5 associated with confined animal feeding operations had decreased the pulmonary capacity in the local wolf population so um so the story becomes a little more complicated a little more textured and I think a little more interesting in so how do you learn context well none of us have the um time to go back and take a second degree clearly but there are ways to do it uh these are two of my methods one is online one on campus uh so I um this online colloquium on energy history about once a week I I sit in on the seminar and then I go to um sometimes at the school of public policy they have a a real interest in nuclear security so I've heard some very good talks over there so you just pick it up on the Fly you so here's a review recent review in science and here is the uh the um statement of the reviewer he criticizes the person for uh not um would have for not delving deeply into primary sources so primary sources translates into original documents archival uh documents um now so much of this online it doesn't necessarily have to reside in an archive but its original documents not digested histories then uh presented one more time and I'll be that's what I'll be talking about is archival work okay so I've told you all the the reasons why we shouldn't be doing history we don't understand context as as well as his but what do we know what do we bring to the table well disciplinary strength we know the environment right and um I there are many historians who deal in environmental history who Adit admit clearly they do not have the same uh scientific background as people like we have gathered in this group so we do bring a lot to the table and I think uh talking together more is great but we should also understand that it's not just context it's content and context and our strength is content okay so um you know like I said I'm not going to take additional classes uh but I've uh developed sources that I rely on heavily so one of them is this book this green book by Lawrence bades radioactivity in America just fantastic book uh that covers the prevision history of of uh radium and uranium um there's also people out there you can talk to like this Bruce Cameron Reed wrote this really excellent book on the science of the Manhattan Project and uh at least three or four times now I've just emailed him and we have a dialogue on um uh he's a physicist but um and you know some nitty-gritty question questions I gotten answered by just by just talking to Bruce here are some of the other ones the Richard rhods book is the classic I uh I was shocked when I I got it fairly late in my interest in this and I always thought well this is a lay book it's not going to have detail it's it's just the most incredible book the level of of detailing the end notes the footnotes everything it's a superb piece want to P of surprise and just a great book Oppenheimer so you I'm heavily involved already in this project and then the Oppenheimer movie I hear about uh and some movies so my antenna already going they great so I'm checking weekly when is it going to show up at my when show so the first matina of the first day that it opened I was there and it's just it's a great movie I've watched it probably four times since then every time I learn more there's stuff it it's so factr that you you don't get it all un plus you watch it with the subtitles on and you watch it over and over again so um the book uh is intimidating I I have it I have not read it yet I will use it as a resource uh but the movie just just the best really okay so um so I have what I call my major projects that's the the uh this nuclear AR which I'll described now and the ditching one so each of those um has some spin-offs and those are the things that I've actually been working on um heavily this year so what they are is things that um they're um discret nuggets that don't fit really with the main body work but are just too good not to do something with you it describes it's a vignette not a Trea us and it has rigor scientific rigor but not rigor mortis I'm I'm aiming for I'm aiming for a general audience for well I shouldn't say I'm aiming for a broad audience in some cases um like the paper I'll show you it's in elements magazine which is uh from the minerological society and geochemical Society so it's aim that a broad geoscience audience and other things are aiming for a broad L audience really okay so what are some of the potential benefits for uh doing these for me they've been very good because um when you're doing a long-term project the stuff you start to forget it after you know you work at the archive for six months and then six months later you've forgotten a lot of it but if you keep coming back to it and having it close at hand to work on these spin-offs it keeps the material fresh fres and it keeps your writing skills fresh I think writing is like a muscle it has to be exercised um two of the advantages that I didn't realize when I got into this is you get to work with some really excellent editors and uh not just editors who Dole out papers to reviewers editors who you can have a dialogue with how can this be improved just uh it's really been an eye opener for me and uh just a real Delight to work with these and on one of these I'll say you even get to work with an art director which is you know something you don't get on your typical Journal article and it's Outreach we get to reach a larger broader audience so this was the uh first paper this is December 2023 in elements magazine um and um I sent a query into the editor I said here's here's what I'm interested in she she's was very good said well I don't really know you tell me about tell me who you are and and what the paper is about so she I sent her capsule summary oh she liked it then we had a really good back and forth Dialogue on this thing and she featured it in the editor's column in the front and the the term teachable moment came up because what this paper this paper was based on one sheet of paper from the National Archives over here in College Park um I was flipping through this stack of papers which was so in 1945 the occupation of Japan started uh this group called scap Supreme Commander um allied forces in the Pacific that was General MacArthur they were going around finding nuclear materials in Japan and so these were the logs of every visit they made to sites and this one said it was from the shimadzu corporation who you know some of you have worked with shimazu equipment in your lab well shimadzu had a data sheet in there it was almost blank just a few entries and it says 1.0 G radium so you know in your data handling you don't really feed 1.0 is too much right so it caught my interest flip it over on the back and the amount remaining was 9988 something so what it was was which I deciphered working with it they were a supplier of radium to to Japanese labs and hospitals so they bought a gram of radium in Europe and then they were selling it they actually sold it all to One hospital in Japan so why would the why would the scap people be interested in Radium well the initiator for an atomic bomb used either radium or polonium with uh with some something like bar uh brillium and so you know if someone had a radium Supply you know they they got u a red flag put on this is a subject of Interest this one went no place actually it was it was really just for scientific and and Hospital use um but you can see from the second column uh it really was the impetus for giving this talk because one of the things I realized when you're working at an archive is the data comes at you like a slide projector the oldfashioned Kodak slide like this um so you know when we're looking at our data we spread it out on the table and let me look at that that you can't do that in an archive if you have one more sheet turn than the one you're looking at people they come over and they stand next to you and you know they give you a difficult time you can only look at a page at a time in the archive and it's but it's an interesting way to look at it so this thing slide projector came I looked at it hm that's interesting it fil that one away and it turned out to be a paper paper onto itself really okay so there's um about six of us who an informal early radioactivity group um one guy's at the Pennsylvania Department of environment one is a retired NRC another there is a retired radiochemist at nist and people like this one is a radiation oncologist um so one of them the nist guy circulated this picture just um no date and it had a list of who was in the picture so the picture had I think three Nobel Prize winners um and it was that Berkeley that's all I knew from the beginning so when you look at it um so this is Ernest Lawrence right here so if you saw the movie this is Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence uh and lo and behold up here this very boyish looking that's J Robert Oppenheimer and there this is the Yoke the big magnet that surrounds the accelerator that was used at Berkeley that developed um the uranium isotope separation technique so this became U that picture was just one of those pictures that it stops here in your tracks you go wow got to I got to learn more about this so what I learned in just very quick um internet searching was uh more about about Lawrence so Lawrence got his Masters at the University of Minnesota where I got my masters so it interested me in his life story I won't done have time to go into it it's just amazing I'll just tell you two guys from a tiny little town in South Dakota were the biggest drivers of the Manhattan Project in its very beginning and the rest of the story um see me in January and I'll send it to you so here's for the students the word of wisdom uh if you want to have a sustainable textile uh be in your life stick to schools with the same letter so so I was a Minnesota Gopher it pairs very well with the nice fleece a CH fleece so um I can go to any event now and I've gone I actually G to the Minnesota Maryland football game or basketball game and I moved between each side Incognito so Jared had mentioned uh about so it's a little cut off but uh so this this was my U Master's work it was on characterization of of iron oxides and um I worked with Bob Gast who was um had come to Minnesota from Oakridge had a lab that was uh sponsored by atomic energy commission so um he and I arrived about the same time and he was my advisor on both my masters and PhD just a terrific guy so he um was a clay meterologist and the aec was very interested in the work he was doing on a SEL exchange selectivity because at places like Oak Ridge to get rid of the waste the lowlevel waste it would it was funneled into a lake White Oak Lake and soil or clay mineral retention like especially on elic materials um was really what was keeping it from moving further Downstream so curology was important and uh there was a lot of so science work that was funded by the aec so I did my Masters on iron and then was looking for PhD topic so um this book um unfortunately I don't have my original copy uh but from it was published in 1969 it was written for like a lay um High School College audience with some of the tech there was some technical details that were pretty pretty sophisticated but I'm just looking at it you know my viser is knows radioactive waste I'm I've been interested in it since the 1964 World's Fair you could get a dime that had been a radiated and I still have two of these I think so um so since 64 I was I was interested in radioactivity really so then 69 this book comes out and 72 I'm looking for a thes topic and I'm reading this book and I find this what what is this you know I find this element never heard of it couldn't pronounce it so I go and talk to Dr Gast and well we look around there's very little data on it the only data shows that at Hanford it's really moving rapidly uh so this graph doesn't have has ruthenium but ruthenium nitrate and technum were all occurring in anionic forms so technician recurs tc4 minus therefore was not being retained by Iron exchange on Clays uh so um we wrote a grant at a and we wound up uh a five-year grant that funded me and several other grad students so that that was that was great uh so we've talked about this the um the double Peak I won't go into this so let me just move on to um so sorry this is a little cut off but let me just tell you that the reason so I got hired by USGS in 19 um 78 I think and um the reason they hired me is because they had a high level waste program a low-level waste but nothing on uranium mil tailings and this graph came out in reviews of modern physics that showed after long periods and you know at the USGS we don't we talk about geologic time so I forget where the cut off was But like after 10,000 years uranium milts have a higher radiotoxicity than high level waste so that decided we you need to have someone work looking at at uranium miling that was me so in uh 79 very soon after I started um uh we got like a call I remember it was on a Friday uh we've got this problem in Denver we've discovered this dump that we don't really know what this is but radioactive contamination all over the city of Denver or started at one side it grew um there was some knowledge that it was somehow connected to the US Bureau of Minds so this thing started growing Beyond this eventually um it was a large number of I they called the Denver radium site was multiple sites 65 the classic one though was the parking lot to the IHOP on East kfax which is the main drag through Denver one of the interesting things with this was when we went out doing a survey at the site um there was surface contamination in a lot of places at this one corner of this industrial site well it turns out um it was a place where they made Tombstone or they etched tombstones and the way they would do that is sand blasting they would cut out the name and dates of the person they put a heavy rubber sheet on the thing and then the sand blaster would move along like this so every place that it deposited the sand was hot because things like ziron and monazite um these are minerals that have uranium and Thorium in them so uh monazite is is a major player in the story that I'm working on today so this was a good lesson for me just very briefly this was a fascinating site because it was a landfill and you could still read the newspapers in it and I would really like to do some reech if anyone would like to think about a study on this this carbonization of newspaper I mean literally we could go in and we just reach we pull it out and you know you didn't have to you didn't have to do any kind of sophisticated data you would pull it out and read the data on the newspaper it just unbelievable big thicknesses of this look like carbon paper but the ink was still readable so I think there's something I've I've Googled carbonized paper BL can't find anything so moving quickly um so I got into a lot of look look at patents because the radium industry that created all this waste was very secretive they did not publ Journal articles so patents for the entree try to figure out what this what is this material um and so let's see by 82 so I had started digging into you know trying to find out what is the material what is the history of this material so I wrote this paper U the first nuclear industry because this is pre Vision now um and um sent it to Scientific American unsolicited they took it so um I'm very pleased it's the only paper I have with shiv's Regal liquor and and look at this uh I the new Ford LTD right there interspersed with my pages so um recently U um Dava soel who's a a former New York Times science writer was doing this book on Marie Cur she contacted me about two years ago and we just started talking about radium and she would bounce things off the and the best one was the cover design because um they were trying to decide should it be green or blue and so if if you read U so Marie C's daughter wrote a book about about Marie and in there she describes she would hold up these tubes of radium they would glow blue but most people are more familiar with this green color from watch dials and the like that were painted this is a different reaction this is the reaction of radium with zinc sulfide and it flues um green so and this this movie not not the good movie but this movie uh used the green color but um the shanov radiation effect that you see in the pool of our reactor here that's really where the blue comes from so in the end so it was green and blue green and blue and that's how the color the cover evolved and so this is just another the nice thing about work in Scientific American they they do wonderful Graphics uh again art director something we don't typically have so there was this in the original Bureau of mining they used a Cascade of bathtubs literally they would decant from one bathtub to another when they were purifying radium and um let me just skip a few of these okay but I want to move to Wendy so thank Wendy she brought up her seminar everything old is new again that's what I wanted to get to okay so in ' 87 so after I had written the Scientific American I was left with all this stuff left over what am I going to do with this you know so I wrote this monograph buried treasure to buried ways because radium was worth U $120,000 a gram at its peak and then it went to zero you had to pay people to take your radium at the end so the story is this I think fascinating story of of buried treasure to buried waste but so in so this is when it really got to the the bottom in uh for about 20 years in the 60s and 80s the EPA and the Public Health Service collected unwanted radium sources 140 CES that's a that's a lot of radium the shatu story I told you that was one cury was 140 curies and in 83 that whole Supply was buried at Hanford okay now 2024 I told you about the medical Isotopes radium 226 is in incredible demand the prices skyrocketing the price is I did a calculation that it's about the same 120,000 a gram um translated into $224 um they're almost equivalent of it's selling for about a million dollars a gram at this point and you can't get it there is none because it's all been put into geologic repositories so here's a company you know um there this is the only operating uranium Mill in the US but they they've just gotten into the medical Isotopes field get that okay I'm so the reason they want this is for it's called tat targeted Alpha uh therapy so you attach an alpha emitter to a molecule that will bind to sites on cancer cells and um so this is a huge breakthrough in the limiting factor now is we just don't have enough radium okay so let me skip to uh the um basis of this radiation study I'm doing and I will wrap it up in the next 3 or 4 minutes so if you like acronyms the uh nuclear remediation is the field for you so I worked on uranium mil taning that's umtra the uranium mil tling remedial action act there's another act called fosp formally utilized site remedial Action Program so if you look at the distribution the umra sites are all in the west this is where the uranium deposits are these were all Sites the W that processed um material for the Manhattan Project okay so they're scattered all over the place so I was reading this report this 2013 I read it in like 2021 or something um because it's still of interest to me the West Lake site is one of the F sites and this was a table in there and so one of the tables uh is um one of the items is captured Japanese uranium containing Sands so this is when that EKG BLiP BLiP BLiP BLiP what is that what does that mean so it never couldn't figure what this meant so so it turns out let me ski that and um so I wrote the author and you know he said you know hi you know never heard of this before I said the implication is that the Japanese were doing nuclear weapons research in war World War II agree he he doesn't respond so I decided Well I'm going to find out myself so Wikipedia believe it or not had an article just like this on the Japanese it wasn't a big secret okay yeah the Japanese did have a nuclear weapons project and indeed this material that's now buried in St Louis is part of that project so at that point I was just hooked on the topic and the rest is history just show you some pictures this is um in Japan let's see summer before last the that picture I showed you at Berkeley with the the magnetic Yol these are some of the accelerators early accelerators at the lab that was involved with this work and there's the Berkeley picture again so I contacted the National Archives and within 11 days got tremendous guidance on you know I didn't know where to start on this this uh archist has just been tremendous so I think I probably should leave it at that and U thank you [Applause]