Article from Denver Post

["Jim Hardeman" <Jim_Hardeman@mail.dnr.state.ga.us>]

URL = http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0625a.htm 

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Rocky Flats: The price of peace

By Mark Obmascik
Denver Post Staff Writer 

June 25, 2000 - No human had worked here for 40 years, but Ricky Mote felt ready. He layered on four sets of safety boots and three pairs of gloves and squeezed the rest of his body into two airtight moon suits. Just in case, an ambulance waited.

Mote expected some danger while digging up 171 drums of uranium from a trench at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

What he didn't expect, though, was exploding green goo.

In one of the first jobs of the $7.7 billion Rocky Flats cleanup - the most massive public-works project in the history of Colorado and the first of its kind on Earth - Mote motioned a co-worker in a backhoe, Jeff Herring, to scoop out an unmarked barrel.

The black drum was rotted, and some lime-green sludge, loaded with uranium, oozed out. Mote edged closer for a look.

Suddenly: Fire!

Mote leapt backward from the blue flash and waved for help. Joe Fanning, another worker in a moon suit, jumped ahead with his brass shovel.

One dump of sand and the uranium fire was out. But the crew was shaken.

"I just about pooped myself," Mote said of the August 1998 flash fire.

At Rocky Flats, it was one drum down, 1,099,956 to go.

In the next six years, the U.S. government plans to turn Rocky Flats, one of the world's most fearsome and filthy nuclear bomb factories, into 6,000 acres of hiking and biking trails and light industry 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver.

With little public attention, the top-secret complex has trucked out an estimated 600 plutonium pits, key weapon parts that each carry the killing power of a Hiroshima bomb, down Interstate 25 in Denver to another government facility in Texas.

A former plutonium lab has been reduced to a concrete slab, and 4,060 gallons of volatile plutonium solutions have been drained from leaking pipes and tanks. 

Another 30 tons of depleted uranium has been unearthed from outdoor trenches by $20-an-hour workers such as Mote, Fanning and Herring.

All that was the easy part.

Now the U.S. government is pushing ahead to do something at Rocky Flats that has never been done anywhere: detoxify a nuclear bomb plant.

Among the challenges:


Finding 1,100 pounds of plutonium that somehow became lost in ductwork, drums and industrial gloveboxes. The amount of missing plutonium at Rocky Flats is enough to build 150 Nagasakistrength bombs.

Cleaning 13 "infinity rooms" - places so radioactive that instruments go off the scale when measurements are attempted. One infinity room is so bad that managers welded its door shut in 1972. Another room was stuffed with plutonium-fouled machinery and then entombed in concrete.

Trucking out dangerous materials. In the next two years, an estimated 16,000 pounds of highgrade plutonium must be moved through metro Denver to South Carolina. On top of that, to meet the planned 2006 cleanup completion date, Rocky Flats must ship out more than three truckloads of radioactive waste each day; the plant now moves only two truckloads a week.

Controlling costs. Cleanup delays at Rocky Flats would cost taxpayers $2 million a day. The project already is two years behind schedule, though cleanup managers express confidence they'll soon catch up. The government expects to spend nearly twice as much to raze Rocky Flats as it spent to build Denver International Airport.

Protecting workers and neighbors. Cleanup workers are opening contaminated drums and pipes that haven't been handled for four decades. The result: Employee radiation doses have been climbing. The main cleanup contractor was fined $41,250 last month after a demolition worker suffered a heavy radiation dose from a finger cut while taking apart a plutonium furnace.
The cleanup carries import far outside Colorado. With dozens of old Cold War weapons factories awaiting decontamination in the United States, the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France, Rocky Flats is a key test case for the world's nuclear cleanup industry.

"Rocky Flats is the flagship site . . . in demonstrating tangible and significant progress toward safe closure of former nuclear weapons production sites," said U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department is managing the cleanup. "The safe closure of Rocky Flats by 2006 is a top priority."

Much information about Rocky Flats still is classified by the government as top secret. To tell how the 700-building complex became so contaminated - and how it will be decontaminated - The Denver Post interviewed dozens of workers, reviewed thousands of pages of records and toured bomb-making buildings that remain protected by anti-aircraft guns, foot-thick vaults and guards with submachine guns.

Put simply, Rocky Flats is a mess.

One highly polluted bomb building, the size of three football fields, was described in 1994 as the most dangerous building in America. Another was so heavily contaminated by a plutonium fire that engineers finally quit trying to clean it and instead built a false ceiling to entrap the splattered radioactivity above workers' heads. At an outdoor pad that once stored 5,200 drums of radioactive waste, an underground plume of plutonium, oil and carcinogenic industrial solvents is seeping downhill.

Nobody envisioned such major pollution problems on March 23, 1951, when the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the nation was building a top-secret nuclear weapons plant in a rocky but flat ranching area of Jefferson County. The Denver Post heralded the government decision with a front-page headline: "There's good news today." The story ran next to a Korean War photo with the headline: "20,000 Reds Flee Yank Paratroopers."

By the time the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik into space in 1957, Rocky Flats had become the linchpin in the nation's nuclear bomb system. Rocky Flats took plutonium, made by other government plants or recycled from old warheads in the field, and turned it into one of the most highly engineered devices ever made by man - plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear bombs.

A hollow sphere that varies in size from a grapefruit to a soccer ball, a plutonium pit explodes with the power of a Hiroshima bomb. During World War II, that was enough to kill 140,000 people.

But in today's nuclear arsenal, the pit serves mainly as a starter that ignites the final firepower of a thermonuclear weapon; a pit is the compact A-bomb that detonates the overall H-bomb. In modern warheads, Rocky Flats pits set off weapons 600 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, which itself was the explosive equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.

According to declassified reports, the government made about 70,000 pits while Rocky Flats operated from 1953 to 1989. That's equal to five pits a day.

It's hard to walk through the inner reaches of Rocky Flats today without feeling at least a little unnerved. In the coldest days of the Cold War, up to 8,000 workers entered here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to build the most deadly devices ever invented.

Visitors must pass through as many as four security stops before entering any classified section of the bomb complex. Rocky Flats spends $55 million a year on security, an amount that exceeds the annual budget for every police and sheriff's department in Colorado except Denver.

At the first Rocky Flats checkpoint, to protect against terrorist suicide missions, guards with submachine guns swab dust from the steering wheels and doors of visiting cars to check for explosives residue.

The second checkpoint is staffed by more armed guards, who screen visitors with metal detectors and scan fingers and palms with a computer that matches handprints with government records. Most people who proceed through this guard station already have received a topsecret "Q" clearance, which requires a full investigation of at least the past 10 years of their personal lives.

A third checkpoint just outside a plutonium building screens the visitor's necklace of five or so security badges to make sure the person is allowed inside. Some buildings also post a fourth security station, where more guards with submachine guns check visitor badges behind a portal of bulletproof glass and 4-inch-thick metal doors.

The perimeter of the 385-acre pit production area is surrounded by two razor-wire fences, security cameras and prison-like watch towers with more armed guards. To foil helicopter landings, anti-aircraft guns are stationed on the roofs of several buildings.

If all the outdoor security feels spooky, it's just a prelude for what lies inside the plutonium buildings. And one place looms largest in Rocky Flats lore - Building 771.

"It's known as the Hole. It's the worst damn building in the whole complex," said Tony DeMaiori, who has worked at the complex for 20 years.

A windowless two-story concrete structure dug into a hillside in 1951, Building 771 was the world's first factory-sized plutonium processing plant. Almost every nuclear weapon ever made by the United States started here.

It was not clean work.

Building 771 took scraps of plutonium, or tainted plutonium from old warheads, and recycled it into gray buttons, or ingots, roughly the size of a hockey puck. Purifying the plutonium required vast amounts of nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride and caustics.

Almost all work was done inside the building's 217 gloveboxes, aquarium-like containers that ranged in size from one minivan to three Winnebagos. Each glovebox was outfitted with several pairs of elbow-length gloves, made of rubber and lead, which protected workers' hands from radiation while handling plutonium.

With 147,900 square feet of cauldrons, precipitators, furnaces and a giant incinerator, Building 771 helped win the Cold War by turning hundreds of retired old pits into powerful new ones.

But the same chemicals that liquefied and purified plutonium also ate through overhead plumbing.

The result: Leak after leak after leak.

"Occasionally you'd feel a drip on your head and you'd be contaminated with plutonium nitrate," DeMaiori said.

In the vocabulary of Rocky Flats, contamination was "crap." Workers sprayed with radioactivity were "crapped up." Workers sprayed with so much radioactivity that they exceeded the government's annual dose limits - and were forced out of plutonium areas and into desk-job assignments - were "crapped out." 

Jim Kelly, who worked 23 years in Building 771, said his worst moment came when coworkers heaving a drum of plutonium waste into the incinerator accidentally dropped it down his back.

"They dumped a barrel of crap on me. Oh, it was a hellhole to work in," he said.

"771 was a building that was feared, and the reason was leaks - leaks from the pipes, leaks from the valves, leaks from the boxes. There were incidents there every day, every week, every year that I worked there.

"There was always tape or plastic on something to stop the leaks. It looked like a building that had 5 million Band-Aids slapped on it." 

Still, workers kept coming back to the Hole. One reason was the terrific camaraderie forged by terrible working conditions. Another reason was "hot pay." When Kelly started work in 1956, hot pay was an extra dime an hour on top of the $2 standard wage. Today the top rank-and-file decontamination workers make $20 an hour, or $30 per hour for time in a moon suit with an oxygen tank.

With hot pay comes risk. Al Williams remembers working with his arms deep in a glovebox when he felt some warmth on his leg.

It was leaking plutonium solution.

"There was a hole in the box," Williams said. "Things were different in the old days."

John Goodnow doesn't even know when he was contaminated. After finishing a routine inspection of a plutonium tank-draining area, he got ready to leave for the locker room.

Then a co-worker with a radiation meter found something on Goodnow's safety bootie.

"You can't see it or feel it or taste it or smell it, but it was there," Goodnow said. "I must have just walked across something." His dose was small and is not expected to pose any health problems. But another Building 771 employee, Don Gable, died of brain cancer at age 31, in 1980, after working part of every day with his head 6 inches from a plutonium nitrate pipe. The government lost the dead man's brain before an autopsy could check for radiation.

One storage tank area was so plagued with leaks that workers called it the "snake pit" and dreaded the shifts when they were assigned to clean it.

And then there was Room 141, which contained a pump that squirted so often that low areas in the floor sometimes flooded with 2 inches of plutonium nitrate. Cleanup crews managed to drain the room but then stopped work after failing to reduce radioactivity below the level that reads "infinity" on standard plant instruments.

The door finally was welded shut in 1972, creating a radioactive time capsule that has gone unvisited by any person since the days of Watergate and Archie Bunker's "All in the Family." Room 141 was abandoned so quickly that a peek through the window today shows a jackhammer still stuck in the floor.

That was an accidental spill. Sometimes workers spilled plutonium on purpose to prevent even bigger trouble.

During complex chemical operations, so much plutonium nitrate dripped onto the bottom of gloveboxes that workers faced the risk of criticality - an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that sprayed a deadly stream of neutrons. To prevent criticality, workers did the nuclear equivalent of pulling the plug on a bathtub. They used a "crit valve" to dump plutonium nitrate from the glovebox to the factory floor. That prevented a criticality disaster from ever occuring at Rocky Flats.

"When you got more than 2 inches of liquid in a box, you'd have a choice - you either have a criticality, or you have a cleanup job," 

said Don Sabac, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961. "You always chose the cleanup job."

For a worker, that meant dropping to his or her hands and knees and scrubbing the plutonium solution off the floor with industrial cleanser, called K.W., and strengthened paper towels called Kimwipes.

That didn't always work. Acids in plutonium solutions often ate through concrete floors or walls and prevented a thorough cleanup. So workers painted over dozens of radioactive areas with purple or brown epoxy.

Paint could seal off nuclear spills, but it took more than that to clean up after fires.

Plutonium shavings can catch on fire just by being piled in the wrong shape or being exposed to the wrong chemical. At Rocky Flats, the wrong thing happened a lot.