Oral History of Ellen Smith

ORAL HISTORY OF ELLEN SMITH

Interviewed by Keith McDaniel

December 2, 2016

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MR. MCDANIEL:This is Keith McDaniel, and today is December the 2nd, 2016. I am at my studio here in Oak Ridge, and today my guest for the Oral History Project is Ellen Smith. Ellen, thank you for coming by and talking with me.
MS. SMITH: Thank you for the opportunity, Keith.
MR. MCDANIEL:You are a City Council member, currently.
MS. SMITH: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL:We'll get to that, but let's start at the beginning. Why don't you tell me where you were born and raised, something about your family?
MS. SMITH: Well, I grew up in Connecticut. Born in New Haven. My parents had met at Yale University. My dad was a faculty member and my mother was a graduate student. They're both scientists. My dad was a forester, taught forestry at the university for over 40 years.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, wow.
MS. SMITH: My mother was trained in zoology, had a PhD. I was raised in a household of scientists, and ...
MR. MCDANIEL:A household of smart people.
MS. SMITH: I eventually came here to a science city.
MR. MCDANIEL:Do you have brothers and sisters?
MS. SMITH: Yeah. I have a younger sister who's an architect in Colorado.
MR. MCDANIEL:What city did you grow up in?
MS. SMITH: I grew up in the town of Hamden, outside New Haven.
MR. MCDANIEL:Okay. New Haven. What was it like growing up in a family with two professors and two, I would imagine, intellectuals?
MS. SMITH: Well, it's the way I grew up.
MR. MCDANIEL:I understand that. I understand that. What would be unique about that?
MS. SMITH: I grew up being expected to know an awful lot of what some people might consider the esoteric, and grew up with sort of an expectation and understanding of how lots of different things fit together. One thing that we found amusing, thinking about my dad after he passed away, was that we traveled all around New England and we missed lots of small town centers, because my dad knew how to get from one place to another without ever going through the center of town. In subsequent years, in visiting New England, I've discovered places that I didn't know existed in areas that I'd been to dozens of times. He'd worked a lot in different parts of rural New England and so we'd learned the region, and we had a strong sense of things like how the history of the forests of New England had interacted with the history of people through the centuries.
MR. MCDANIEL:Exactly. I would imagine in that kind of household you were probably exposed to a lot of different types of people. As far as maybe some of their co-workers, or scientists.
MS. SMITH: There were things like foreign visitors, and our church was full of people who taught at Yale Divinity School.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh really?
MS. SMITH: It was a fairly intellectually-rich setting.
MR. MCDANIEL:When you were growing up, did you know what you wanted to do?
MS. SMITH: No.
MR. MCDANIEL:You graduated high school ...
MS. SMITH: I graduated from high school, and I went off to college in Minnesota. I chose between a college in Vermont and a college in Minnesota, and I'd never been to Minnesota so I said, "I'm going to go there. I've been to Vermont plenty of times." I was interested in the sciences. I studied German. I was interested in that. I was interested in history, but I ended up majoring in geology. It involved lots of field trips to interesting places. It's an integrative science in a lot of respects. It integrates bits of chemistry and physics, and a lot of natural history.
MR. MCDANIEL:You got your bachelor's in geology.
MS. SMITH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:And then?
MS. SMITH: Then I spent a couple of years in the Pacific Northwest, doing the sorts of things that young people do in the Pacific Northwest. Then my husband and I went to grad school at University of Wisconsin in Madison. I spent five years in Madison. He got a PhD. I had finished with a master's and worked for the State of Wisconsin for a couple of years.
MR. MCDANIEL:Where did you meet your husband?
MS. SMITH: In college, actually. Then he got a post-doc in Oak Ridge, and that's what brought us here.
MR. MCDANIEL:What was his field?
MS. SMITH: His degree is in forestry and botany. He's an ecologist at Oak Ridge National Lab. He's currently leading a number of research projects related to ecological impacts and change, and just investigating global change.
MR. MCDANIEL:You got married, you were in ... Where did you say you got your master's?
MS. SMITH: In Wisconsin. University of Wisconsin.
MR. MCDANIEL:University of Wisconsin. Then your husband got an opportunity to come to Oak Ridge?
MS. SMITH: Yeah. We came here ...
MR. MCDANIEL:What year did you come here?
MS. SMITH: We came here in 1981. I've been working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 1982. He was already there as a post-doc and I was hired on in early 1982. We've been in the same division at ORNL for all these years. Most of my work at ORNL has been related in some way to environmental impact assessment. I'd worked in waste management before I came here, and I've ended up doing quite a lot of work related to the now-abandoned Yucca Mountain project and also the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, and reviewed a lot of draft environmental documents for DOE Headquarters over the years. I've really learned quite a lot about the nuclear business and the Department of Energy over the years. I started out calling myself a hydrologist or geologist. Now I call myself an environmental scientist. I've kind of become a jack of all trades. It's been an interesting place to work in part because you never know what's going to come around the corner next. We're asked to do a wide variety of things related to federal government needs. Lately I've done a lot of work for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on analysis of flooding that is being done in part in response to the Fukushima accident. The NRC went in and asked all of the licensees for the existing nuclear fleet to reevaluate their potential vulnerability to flooding. Also worked on flooding assessment for a new reactor license. Later this winter, I expect I'm going to have to go to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission meeting to talk about that.
MR. MCDANIEL:Oh, is that right?
MS. SMITH: That's an interesting adventure.
MR. MCDANIEL:I bet.
MS. SMITH: We've had our finger in or aware of a diverse variety of things that are going on. It can be an annoying place to be sometimes but it can be real interesting, too.
MR. MCDANIEL:Since you've been there since '82, so you've been there what, what is that? 25 years?
MS. SMITH:Thirty-five.
MR. MCDANIEL:Thirty-five years. I would imagine you've kind of seen it all, across the country, as far as DOE and the environmental impact of the Department of Energy over the years and things such as that. What are your impressions? General impressions.
MS. SMITH: Things have changed an awful lot. The Federal Government has always tried to be responsible in how it deals with the things like waste, but we're a whole lot more responsible now than we used to be from a technical standpoint. There's been a great deal of change. When I came here, there were still questions of whether the Department of Energy was liable to comply with Federal environmental law. That's no longer a question. That was actually resolved in, I think it was about 1984, in a lawsuit related to the Y-12 plant. That's changed dramatically. We at the Lab have less of a role in any of that than we used to, now that the Department of Energy has gotten into hiring direct contractors to do specific projects and taken the management and operating facilities like ORNL out of the picture on doing a lot of their work on things like how they manage waste. We've had the Environmental Management Organization with a series of project management contractors come in and do that kind of work. That's changed. One thing I'm real aware of is it takes a lot fewer people to do work than it did when I first came here. That's a change we've seen across the country in general, that organizations have become leaner and that's ...
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that because of technology, it's become more efficient, or ...?
MS. SMITH: Some of it's technology. We used to have lots of typists, for example. There aren't all that many of them anymore. I think we've also lost a lot in the richness that we used to have, and one thing that we had at the Lab when I first went to work that some of us kind of miss was we had technical editors who went over our writing, and for a young staff person, that was a learning experience. We resented what we were told, but we also learned a lot from it and we improved from it. Unfortunately, we don't have that anymore.
MR. MCDANIEL:Really?
MS. SMITH: I think that it's become a more challenging environment for people to succeed in, because basically most of us are what university people would call "soft money." In my part of the Lab anyway, we're not working in a large program. We're basically finding our own activities and working together as small teams on a bunch of different projects. That challenge to keep performing that way without some of the kinds of training and support resources people used to have is probably rough on young people.
MR. MCDANIEL:Let's go back to something you mentioned earlier, if you could go into it just a little bit more. You said that things certainly have changed over the years and that DOE has always tried to be responsible. I know certainly things have changed, and of course, regulations have come about over the years. Is it in the early years, do you think, that ... I know they tried. I'm not talking bad about them. I'm just saying, do you think maybe there was a combination of, "It's not as important as maybe some people think it is"? And also, "We don't really know how to do that"?
MS. SMITH: Yeah, both of those were probably involved. One thing that I've looked into is some of the early history at the Lab, that when they started operating the Graphite Reactor and processing the materials that came out of it, I'm not sure they even knew what they were dealing with in terms of the substances. They built White Oak Dam across White Oak Creek to hold back whatever was coming out in the water, that was going to end up there. They sent a lot of waste to what were called pits and trenches that they built in Melton Valley, that were basically dug into soil that had a lot of clay in it and had clay minerals that held back the substances that they were finding.It was cesium in particular that they were able to retard by putting it into trenches and having it react with the clay. There was an effort to find things that could be done to ameliorate the potential effects.Of course, in the wartime situation there were exigencies that prevented doing things as thoroughly as you might otherwise. It's dangerous working around those materials, too. Over the years, some of the same kinds of things were done, only they improved. One of the things that happened here because of all the radioactivity that we had in the environment was the establishment of the environmental sciences organization that I've worked for. In the 1950s, they brought in people with a soils background to investigate things like the ability of different clays to attenuate things like cesium and other materials. Ecologists got involved in basically trying to track where radioactive substances were going in the forest, in the streams, and so forth. That actually led to a whole area of ecology that was developed out of the work at ORNL.
MR. MCDANIEL:Is that right?
MS. SMITH: Related to understanding the flow of nutrients, and just how nutrients in particular are processed through an ecosystem. Who eats what, and how the nutrients flow from one organism to the next through the system.
MR. MCDANIEL:I guess probably one of the most famous ... I don't mean to dwell on this, but one of the most famous instances of not really, as I've mentioned, maybe not really knowing and not taking as much care, is the whole mercury thing that happened at Y-12.
MS. SMITH: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL:I'm not sure what the final numbers were, but they lost a lot of mercury.
MS. SMITH: Secrecy really sometimes became an excuse for sloppiness. I wasn't at Y-12. I've only heard the stories, but clearly there were a lot of corners cut because they could. Probably also not really thinking about the consequences of some of the things they were doing. Of course, none of us were as acutely aware of the hazards of mercury when we were kids, as people are now. It probably wasn't recognized as being as serious a challenge from a public health and environmental standpoint as it would be now.
MR. MCDANIEL:There's still a legacy of that in our environment. A huge one in our area.
MS. SMITH: That's been an interesting story locally, that in the early 1990s we thought that most of the East Fork Poplar Creek flood plain might have to be cleaned up, to take the mercury concentration down below 10 parts per billion in the soil, but further investigations discovered that a lot of our mercury is tied up tight. It's not going anywhere. Plants were grown in it and they didn't take up any mercury. DOE did treatability studies where they heated soil to try to vaporize the mercury and they could make bricks long before the mercury started to vaporize. We ended up without the kind of massive excavation we were thinking of, and there's still mercury getting into the creek and some of it's coming out of that soil in the flood plain.But it's interesting that we avoided that, and it was avoided largely because of Oak Ridgers, many of them retirees, who got data and delved into it and argued for a different solution than digging things up.
MR. MCDANIEL:That was kind of a well-known, very highly publicized event. I think what you said just a minute ago is very apropos in a lot of instances, that secrecy is an excuse for sloppiness sometimes.
MS. SMITH: Unfortunately, that's happened.
MR. MCDANIEL:Especially early on. Especially early on. In the mid-80s, I guess not long after you were here, that's when Oak Ridge really started to see the environmental lobby, the environmental groups started to really make some changes, or at least through DOE in Oak Ridge in the mid-80s.
MS. SMITH: Yeah. Things were changing then.
MR. MCDANIEL:I interviewed Joe LaGrone who came and really kind of headed that whole thing up, and he talked quite a bit about what his mission was, and what kind of reaction he got to it in Oak Ridge.
MS. SMITH: In the ‘90s, when I was first on the Environmental Quality Advisory Board in the city, our activities were covered regularly in The Oak Ridger. We'd have a reporter come to our meetings, and often a story on what we did would be in the following day's Oak Ridger, on the front page sometimes. Joe LaGrone ended up deciding that he needed to send a senior staff member from DOE to all of our meetings, to communicate with us and communicate back to him what we were talking about because he was very concerned about the visibility. That's of course changed over the years, in large part because we no longer have the kind of media coverage we used to. That's been a change in the community, that we used to have a lot more broad understanding of a variety of things that were going on in town because The Oak Ridger was widely read and had a lot of reporters. I miss that. I miss newspapers.
MR. MCDANIEL:Exactly. Tell me about that group and your involvement with it, the environmental ... What was it again?
MS. SMITH: I served on the city's Environmental Quality Advisory Board, which still exists. It was established in Oak Ridge in 1970, after the first Earth Day. It's been a city advisory board ever since. I served beginning in '91 until I was first elected to city council in 2007. Then I also served for a couple of years in 2012 to 2014 while I was not on council. That group was established, as I said, after the first Earth Day with a fairly broad purview. It's also the City Tree Board, and has other functions.
MR. MCDANIEL:What was their main mission? What's the main mission of that board? It probably has changed.
MS. SMITH: Yeah. It's changed, and its charter is something along the lines of, "Advising the city government on measures, matters related to the environmental quality of the city."
MR. MCDANIEL:Right. The name.
MS. SMITH: That's extremely broad.
MR. MCDANIEL:That is very broad.
MS. SMITH: In the ‘90s, we did hear an awful lot about what was going on in DOE and on the Oak Ridge reservation in terms of really early stages of cleanup, responding to environmental concerns. There's also always been a role of getting concerns sometimes from citizens about a diverse variety of things related to ... There are concerns about what might be going on in their neighborhood. In the last few years, the Environmental Quality Advisory Board crafted a climate action plan for the city, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by something like 80% over a number of decades. They've been tracking the early progress of that, and somewhat to my surprise the first goals were actually met. Progress continues to be made, but that's something that I think we're proud of as a city, that something we're doing.It's not something that most towns of our size are attempting to do. Probably some others are accomplishing the same sorts of things without tracking their progress.But in Oak Ridge we track progress.