Karen Dorn Steele

Karen Dorn Steele (middle) and other journalists tour the PUREX Plant in 1985.

U.S. Department of Energy photo. https://celp.org/karen-dorn-steele/

Article Written By Faith Bennett

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Karen Dorn Steele is an environmental journalist known for breaking the story of nuclear experiments causing potential public health damage at the Hanford Nuclear Site. Her 1985 cover story for the Spokesman-Review on communities downwind of the Hanford production, and her subsequent coverage of nuclear pollution in the water, soil, and wildlife in the surrounding area, linked the immediate site of the B Reactor to the surrounding communities affected by the environmental consequences of radioactive contamination.¹

Born Karen Moxness in 1943 in Portland, Oregon to Margaret Moxness and Ronald Moxness, Karen Dorn Steele spent much of her childhood traveling abroad as her father worked as a press attaché with the United States Information Agency. She attended school in Brussels, Frankfurt, and Rabat, which made her a keen cultural observer, a skill she carried into her career as a journalist.² Dorn Steele attended college at Stanford University, earned her bachelor’s degree in history and went to work in the United States Congress for Democratic representative Edith Green. While in the nation’s capital she met her first husband, Charles Dorn, whom she married in 1965.³ In 1968, Dorn Steele received her Master’s in history before the couple moved to Spokane, Washington, just a few hours’ drive from the Hanford Nuclear Site.

In Spokane, Dorn Steele became increasingly interested in environmental issues through her work as a reporter at the newspaper the Spokesman-Review, public television, and the Spokane Daily Chronicle, a newspaper that later merged with the Spokesman-Review.⁴ At the Chronicle, Dorn Steele started her career of environmental investigative journalism with a series of stories she published on local power plants and Kaiser Aluminum. Dorn Steele began her research on Hanford following President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative, which involved the refurbishment of Hanford’s PUREX facility and the N Reactor.⁵ While beginning research on nuclear waste, Dorn Steele said she was “struck by how much we didn’t know about Hanford.”⁶ Hunting for information about possible pollution from the Hanford Plant, Karen Dorn Steele met a Ringold farmer named Tom Bailie who told Dorn Steele about taking thyroid medication as a child, as well as avoiding the milk of Hanford dairy cattle and the fish that swam in the Columbia River. In a cover story for the 1985 Spokesman Review, Dorn Steele wrote about Bailie and other area farmers who lived on the “death mile” of Ringold where only one out of ten farm families was not afflicted with cancer.⁷ A sidebar of the story also written by Dorn Steele, titled “The night the ‘little demons’ were born,” recounted the experiences of a Basin City, Washington farmer who witnessed the birth of 31 lambs who were “born mummified.” The story also noted an unusually high number of additional lamb stillbirths on neighboring farms in the early 1960s.⁸

Later that year, after publishing the cover story on the community which has since become known as “Hanford Downwinders,” Dorn Steele filed a request for documents from the Department of Energy through the Freedom of Information Act. In these documents, Dorn Steele found evidence of the “Green Run,” a 1949 government experiment meant to test the movement of Iodine 131, a radioisotope, through the air. The experiment conducted between December second and third consisted of the deliberate deactivation of the filters that kept the radioactive iodine-131 out of the air.⁹ This controlled release of radioactive iodine was meant to allow scientists an opportunity to measure the airborne movement of radioactive chemicals and resulted in varying levels of ground contamination near Hanford.¹⁰ Dorn Steele was able to break this story in the spring of 1986. It prompted national attention and led to several lawsuits on behalf of people who lived downwind of the Hanford nuclear site seeking compensation from the Department of Energy and government contractors who worked in Hanford. The so-called Downwinder Litigation began in 1991 and featured complaints from between 3,000 and 5,000 people represented by 14 different legal firms; however, only six plaintiffs were ever heard by a federal jury. The final Downwinder lawsuit was settled in 2015.¹¹ Dorn Steele reported on the litigation throughout. In 2018 she was awarded the Watershed Hero Award from the Center for Environmental Law and Policy.¹²

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¹ - Karen Dorn Steele, “Downwinders- Living with Fear,” Spokesman-Review, July 28, 1985, 1-10, https://www.newspapers.com/image/572510245/.

² - The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; Series Title: Passenger and Crew Lists of Vessels and Airplanes Departing from New York, New York, 07/01/1948-12/31/1956; NAI Number: 3335533; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Record Group Number: 85; Series Number: A4169; NARA Roll Number: 196 Ancestry.com. U.S., Departing Passenger and Crew Lists, 1914-1966 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2016; “Karen Dorn Steele,” Center for Environmental Law & Policy, 2018, https://celp.org/karen-dorn-steele/; “Karen Dorn Steele's Interview,” Voices of the Manhattan Project, 2015, https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/karen-dorn-steeles-interview.

³ - “C. Dorn to Marry This Fall,” Great Falls Tribune, September 12, 1965, 50, https://www.newspapers.com/image/239950863/?terms=karen%2Bmoxness.

⁴ - “Karen Dorn Steele,” Center for Environmental Law & Policy.

⁵ - U.S. Department of Energy, Michelle S Gerber, “History of Hanford Site Defense Production (Brief) HNF-5041-FP,” (2001), 9.

⁶ - Ray Ring, “One Good Example: The Reporter,” High Country News, October 13, 2003, https://www.hcn.org/issues/260/14311.

⁷ - Dorn Steele, “Downwinders- Living with Fear.”

⁸ - Karen Dorn Steele, “The night the ‘little demons’ were born,” Spokesman-Review, July 28, 1985, 10. https://www.newspapers.com/image/572510427/

⁹ - Gordon Katic, “#8 America’s Chernobyl,” podcast audio, July 29, 2020, https://citedpodcast.com/2020/07/30/8-americas-chernobyl-1-of-2/; Technical Steering Panel, Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project, "The Green Run," Fact Sheet 12, March 1992.

¹⁰ - Technical Steering Panel, "The Green Run.”

¹¹ - Annette Cary, “Final Hanford Downwinder Lawsuit Settled after 24 Years,” Seattle Times, October 8, 2015, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/environment/final-hanford-downwinder-lawsuit-settled-after-24-years/.

¹² - “March 2- Winter Waters 2018,” Center for Environmental Law & Policy, 2018, https://live-celp.pantheonsite.io/events/winter-waters-2018/.

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Acknowledgements:

This project was made possible in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

This project was conducted in Partnership with the University of California Davis History Department through the Californian Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit, CA# P20AC00946