Full Body Burden (33 page)

He’s caught again. The principal withholds his diploma for weeks. “That Kurt,” my mother says with a tinge of pride. “I just don’t know what to do about him.”

Karin leaves to take classes in music at the state college and dreams of being in a rock band. Karma is still hitchhiking. No one’s heard from her; no one knows where she is. My father is no longer in our orbit.

T
HE
DOE isn’t unaware of problems at Rocky Flats. An earlier study of plutonium operations details, among other things, “poor quality instruments, improper use of radiation monitoring equipment and faulty record keeping, concerns over antiquated fire detection and alarm systems, waste shipping and storage problems, and poor communication of safety and health matters up and down the organizational structure.” There is “little indication” that work was performed according to federal requirements. But little has changed.
And the government will continue to press Rocky Flats to make bombs for at least another decade.

In response to the discovery of leaking pondcrete, two officials from the Colorado Department of Health, accompanied by two engineers from the EPA, try to inspect Rocky Flats for violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), passed in 1976, which governs disposal of hazardous waste. So far the EPA and the Colorado Department of Health haven’t been very successful in strong-arming Rocky Flats. They can’t even get data about what’s being released into the environment.
Rockwell is not happy to see them. The men are told they’re endangering national security by trying to conduct an inspection and are refused entry to certain areas.

In the fall of 1988, however, the stakes change when a DOE official himself gets contaminated.
On September 29, three people—a special inspector from the DOE and two Rocky Flats workers—are inspecting a room in Building 771. They walk into a room with several bins filled with contaminated tools and clothing next to an air vent. A sign telling the workers to put on respirators has been covered up by a cabinet. The alarm suddenly goes off, and a lab test confirms they’ve all been exposed to plutonium.

Rocky Flats workers are accustomed to occasional misplaced or missing signs, dosimeter badges that don’t work or have been zeroed out, little slips and mishaps that make for a strong sense of camaraderie and no small amount of gallows humor. But the inspector from the DOE is more than a little annoyed.
He files a report detailing “very serious” violations at the plant that leave “no margins for safety,” and criticizes “slow and unskilled” work by radiation monitors. He writes that radiological monitoring equipment is “unchecked, out of service, or out of calibration,” and that there is “haphazard” posting of warning signs. Among his laundry list of other problems is the note that “attitudes are complacent.”

On October 7, 1988, the DOE closes Building 771, at least temporarily. Production is scheduled to resume within weeks. Incensed, the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, the citizens’ watchdog group appointed by Governor Roy Romer and Representative David Skaggs, calls a public meeting in Westminster, a community adjacent to Arvada, on October 25. Officials from Rocky Flats and the DOE agree to show up and answer questions. More than four hundred people jam the room.

Earl Whiteman, a slender, soft-voiced man who serves as the DOE’s manager of Rocky Flats, begins with an informational slide presentation. He briefly describes the contamination incident that led to the closure of Building 771.

“Shut it down!” someone yells from the back. Another voice chimes in. “Shut it down!”

The building
is
shut down, Whiteman explains calmly. It was shut down in response to the September 29 incident. Beginning November 30, the incinerator must be shut down as well, the result of a court order following a successful lawsuit by the Sierra Club, and remain closed until February 28, 1989.

The crowd boos. “Shut it down for good!” someone yells.

“Tell the truth!” another person calls. The phrase is picked up by others in the crowd. “Tell the truth! Tell the truth!” The room is filled with shouts.

Jim Wilson, chairman of the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, calls for everyone to settle down. We don’t need a fistfight, he entreats, because “there are babies in the room.”

Hilda Sperandeo, a sixty-one-year-old schoolteacher from Arvada, stands up to speak. Her husband died of cancer several years earlier. They never knew what was going on at Rocky Flats. She’s not sure if her husband’s illness was associated with Rocky Flats or not. “We just thought it was a factory,” she says. “All they do is lie to you. They don’t care about anything but making bombs.”

Whiteman tries to reassure the crowd that the danger from the plant is minimal, and the amount of plutonium that contaminated the three people on September 29 was minimal as well.

“How much plutonium was involved?” someone asks. “How much exactly?”

Whiteman concedes that the exposure was ten times the amount normally found in the plutonium processing areas at Rocky Flats, and because the bins were near an air vent, radioactivity might have spread throughout the entire building.

Questions turn to the radioactive boxcar refused by the governor of Idaho. “What’s in that boxcar?” someone asks.

Like other boxcars, Whiteman explains calmly, the railcar holds 140 drums of waste. Each fifty-five-gallon drum is permitted by DOE regulations
to contain up to 200 grams of plutonium. Production at Rocky Flats generates one boxcar per week.

The crowd erupts. It’s a well-established fact that a millionth of a gram of plutonium in the body can cause cancer. Further, biochemist Niels Schonbeck stands and declares that 200 grams is twice the amount capable of causing a serious nuclear accident, based on information that Rocky Flats itself has released to the public. Harvey Nichols, the University of Colorado biology professor who studied the pollen and snow around Rocky Flats, agrees. If a small amount of moisture gets inside one of those barrels, he says, an explosion could be triggered.

Just like the rallies at Rocky Flats, a low murmur moves through the crowd.
Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats
.

Not everyone chimes in. Workers from the plant are in the crowd as well. Just before the meeting ends, a man stands and says he is one of the three people who were contaminated on September 29. He refuses to give his name. “I think the whole incident has been blown way out of proportion. I think it is a safe place to work.” There is sporadic applause.

But the DOE is finding itself in deeper and deeper trouble.
Shortly thereafter, a comprehensive DOE study of 160 contaminated sites at sixteen nuclear weapons facilities around the country is released to the public. Rocky Flats is ranked number one—the most dangerous site in the United States—primarily due to hazardous waste in the groundwater and the large population directly downwind and downstream. Ground-water is of particular concern; in addition to plutonium contamination of soils and sediments, the solar evaporation ponds have contributed to nitrate contamination in water supplies. Two buildings at Rocky Flats make the list of the ten most contaminated buildings in America. Number one is Building 771.

Other DOE sites are in trouble, too.
At the 570-square-mile Hanford site near Richland, Washington, liquid radioactive and toxic wastes, dumped into trenches for four decades, have contaminated large underground reservoirs used for drinking water and irrigation. Large amounts of radioactive materials have been released into the Columbia River and
into the air, including approximately 740,000 curies of iodine-131, and the result is a high occurrence of thyroid cancer and other thyroid conditions. The Nevada Test Site, the Pantex facility, the Feed Materials Production Center, and the Savannah River Plant are all deeply contaminated and have affected surrounding areas.

Six weeks later, Building 771 reopens for business, with limited use of the incinerator. The DOE says it has commissioned exhaustive studies to support its contention that Rocky Flats poses no threat to residents. But even some government officials are beginning to disagree. “I don’t believe that it’s possible to reverse the harm that has been done at Rocky Flats,” says Bob Alvarez, an investigator for the U.S. Senate’s Governmental Affairs Committee, which is responsible for monitoring nuclear weapons complexes.
The groundwater and soil at Rocky Flats are so full of radioactive materials and toxic chemicals that Alvarez and other experts expect Rocky Flats to likely become a “national sacrifice zone,” an area that will remain toxic for so long that no living creature will be able to enter without endangering its health.

N
UNS AND
hippies, housewives and physicists, attorneys and Buddhist monks. History makes for odd alliances.

In 1987 two men from separate government agencies form an unlikely team. Jon Lipsky of the FBI’s new Environmental Crimes Division and William Smith of the EPA’s National Environmental Investigation Unit quietly begin to look into alleged abuses at Rocky Flats. They seem straight out of a Rocky Flats version of
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
—but with a happier ending.

Progress is slow. Lipsky, a former Las Vegas street cop who’s not afraid of plutonium, the government, or hard work, has a casual demeanor, but he’s been the lead investigator in thirteen environmental cases. He’s persistent. Years of secrecy and threats have made workers and activists alike very nervous around government types. No one wants to talk. Finally, after months of trying to build trust and convince people of his sincerity, Lipsky gets lucky. An activist gives him the name of Jim Stone.

Stone has been waiting months—no, decades—for a call like this. He loads up all his boxes and takes them down to the FBI’s Denver office. A polite, slightly stout man wearing a fedora, Stone doesn’t look much like a rabble-rouser to Lipsky and Smith. But he has a story and he can’t wait to tell it.

Lipsky has few confirmed facts about contamination at Rocky Flats, but one thing he knows for sure is that the incinerator in Building 771 is supposed to be shut down. Yet he’s heard numerous rumors that it’s being operated illegally. “Are they still burning plutonium out there?” he asks Stone.

“Oh yeah,” Stone replies. “They have so much waste out there that they have to fire up that incinerator. I told them there are better ways, that you don’t have to do it that way. That incinerator is not protected with suitable filters. It’s not even designed to burn common trash properly without causing air pollution. But they said no, this is the most expedient, we’re going to do it this way.”

Rockwell and the DOE have always contended that the 771 incinerator is exempt from RCRA regulation because Rocky Flats is a “plutonium recovery” facility and thus granted an exclusion.

“How do you know these things?” Lipsky asks. Both Lipsky and Smith are having a hard time keeping up with Stone. Stone has waited a long time to talk.

“Well, I worked in that building all the time,” Stone says. “The new incinerator, the fluidized bed incinerator, never did work. They’ve tried it a few times but could never get it certified. There’s a limit on how much hazardous and radioactive waste they can store, and they have no room for it. So they burn it. They burn waste contaminated with plutonium, low-level and medium-level waste.”

“What else do you know?” Smith asks.

“I can tell you about a lot of things,” Stone replies. “Standley Lake, for example. Not only is there plutonium and americium and uranium and you-name-it, but I know by the stratus in the lake sediment when that contamination occurred.”

Lipsky looks over at Smith. They have their first source.

“A lot of contamination goes up the stack [the Building 771 incinerator smokestack] and into the environment,” Stone continues, “because the filters leak like a sieve. The wind prevails from the west. It’s the same thing with the groundwater, with Great Western and Standley Lake just downhill, right on down to the Platte River. Denver is sitting at the gravity base of all this pollution coming down from Rocky Flats. And it has to be stopped at the source.” He pauses. “That’s always an engineer’s primary objective: determine the cause of the problem, get at the source, and correct it there.”

Stone tells Lipsky and Smith about his long history at Rocky Flats, about how he helped build the plant and knows the facility inside and out. Workers have inadequate protection, he says. But he also talks about how workers mess with or remove the filters, because filters slow down production. He talks about how productivity trumps safety or environmental laws. There’s a lot of plutonium missing, Stone adds, some in the ventilation ducts and piping, some blowing around outside.

“
They blackballed me. The industry is spooky about whistle-blowers,” he says. “But I don’t see myself as a whistle-blower. I see myself as a good engineer.”

With this ammunition in hand, Lipsky and Smith contact Ken Fimberg, assistant U.S. attorney for the state of Colorado and a Harvard-trained lawyer with a strong track record in environmental issues. If Rocky Flats is burning contaminated waste in that incinerator, the men say, the technology exists to detect it. Lipsky explains that he wants to do a flyover of the plant and do infrared photography. Contaminated waste gives off heat. Forward-looking infrared (FLIR) will reveal whether there’s anything thermally hot.

There’s a hitch, though. Rocky Flats has guards under orders to shoot if necessary. “
I want a letter of immunity for me to take pictures of Rocky Flats,” Lipsky says. “Your office prosecutes activists all the time for trespassing over there. And it’s under the exact Atomic Energy Act section of trespass that you’re not allowed to take pictures. So I’ll be violating the law, and I want a letter of immunity.”

At first, Fimberg looks at Lipsky and Smith as if they’re out of their minds. But he knows something about Rocky Flats: the fires, the leaking barrels, the lawsuits. Fimberg served on the board of the Colorado Wildlife Federation and clerked for the Environmental Defense Fund. He decides to support their investigation. Lipsky gets the letter.