Rocky Flats cleanup article

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 From the Boulder News:

Erasing the taint of the Cold War from Rocky Flats
 By KATY HUMAN
 Scripps Howard News Service
 August 28, 2000

 ARVADA, Colo. - Winds are feisty around Rocky Flats, once a nuclear weapons
 factory and now a Superfund cleanup site. Occasionally they blow west,
 north or south. Mostly, though, they rush out of the mountains onto the
 plains, sweeping dust eastward. 

 Walnut and Woman Creeks also cut east through the site. 

 Bini Abbott, 68, a farmer and horse-lover, lives downwind and downwater of
 Rocky Flats. She loves the prairie, the bald eagles that nest nearby, the
 water. 

 She has mixed feelings about Rocky Flats, though. Abbott does like the way
 the site, surrounded by a protected buffer zone, has kept townhouses from
 gobbling up the prairie near her home. But she sometimes thinks about the
 accidents that could happen in the cleanup and demolition of the site's
 contaminated buildings and soils. 

 "I worry that in their zeal to clean up, if the wind picks up and there's
 dust, that they'll keep on working. ..." Abbott said. 

 The U.S. Department of Energy, which owns Rocky Flats, has promised to get
 the site cleaned up and shut down - which may mean opened for hiking and
 biking - by 2006. The plan is arguably the most ambitious ever devised by
 the DOE. 

 "We think it is do-able," said Ellen Livingston, senior policy adviser for
 environmental affairs to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. But Livingston
 recognized that the agency is dealing with a "very, very tough goal." 

 As the DOE proceeds with its cleanup work, other federal and state
 officials are rethinking the cleanup standards. Raising the bar for water
 and soil even a little could increase cleanup costs by millions of dollars
 and extend the timeline by years. 

 Managers with Kaiser-Hill, the company hired to do the bulk of the cleanup
 work, have pinned a low likelihood on meeting the 2006 deadline: just a 20
 percent chance. 

 The problems are in unknowns: 

 - After a fire in 1969, workers tossed contaminated material into basements
 and cemented it in place. No one knows how "hot" the stuff is, so it's
 difficult to figure out how to clean it up. 

 - No one knows what sort of contamination lies underneath buildings that
 have yet to come down. 

 - No one knows exactly how people will use the 6,000 acres of land that
 constitute Rocky Flats. Future use is key for cleanup: If people use the
 site just as open space, it may not have to be as clean as if someone works
 in a building there every day. 

 Dozens of such unknowns add up to a mess for cleanup managers and others.
 Though officials say they're optimistic, some former workers and activists
 worry that the rush to finish cleanup could compromise safety. 

 "They can't do it," said Jim Kelly, an Arvada, Colo., resident and former
 steelworker at Rocky Flats. "They can't do it and be honest with people." 

 For nearly four decades and under three contractors - Dow Chemical,
 Rockwell International and then EG&G - Rocky Flats workers manufactured the
 triggers for nuclear bombs. The triggers themselves were small bombs,
 fashioned of radioactive plutonium and toxic beryllium. The work began in
 1952.

 Rocky Flats workers also recycled triggers from retired warheads and
 produced weapons-grade plutonium from old residues. The work involved
 plutonium, uranium, beryllium, solvents and dozens of other toxic
 chemicals. There were spills and fires, explosions and ventilation-system
 failures. 

 During production years, environmental standards were far more lax and were
 ignored at times. Workers buried radioactive waste in drums that leaked.
 Liquids poured into holes on the prairie seeped into the groundwater below. 

 Now Kaiser-Hill, which never had a hand in weapons production, is cleaning
 up the mess. The company has spent $3 billion since 1995, said spokeswoman
 Jennifer Thompson. In a new contract, Kaiser-Hill promised the government
 it will do most of the remaining cleanup work for $4.4 billion. 

 But the new contract doesn't include everything required by the official
 cleanup agreement negotiated between the Energy Department and its
 regulators, the state of Colorado and the U.S. Environmental Protection
 Agency. 

 Even if Kaiser-Hill completes all contracted work, there will still be a
 major problem: Surface water flowing through Rocky Flats will not meet the
 current drinking-water standards detailed in the cleanup agreement. 

 According to the contract, Kaiser-Hill officials need only to clean the
 site well enough so that on-site water meets an "open space" standard. 

 The difference is enormous: The open space standard would probably be about
 140 picocuries of radiation per liter, said Dave Shelton, vice president
 for environmental systems for Kaiser-Hill. That's nearly 1,000 times more
 contamination than allowed under the current drinking-water standard of
 0.15 picocuries per liter. 

 DOE and Kaiser-Hill staff members insist there was no other way to write
 the contract because no one could calculate a cost for cleanup to the
 tighter standard. 

 But site regulators said the Energy Department will have to work hard to
 convince them that the standard must be made more lenient. 

 If the standard doesn't change, the DOE will either hire Kaiser-Hill to do
 more cleanup work or find another contractor to do it, but the work might
 not be done by 2006. 

 The cleanup level at a Superfund site is dictated by its expected future
 use. If the DOE were to let people build homes on Rocky Flats and work
 there, it would have to be cleaner than if development were prohibited and
 only non-motorized recreation allowed. 

 So Arvada Mayor Ken Fellman and others worry that if the site is designated
 open space, as many have proposed, it will not be cleaned up enough. 

 Fellman insists Arvada has no development plans for Rocky Flats land,
 though the city has asked for that in the past. "The No. 1 goal we have
 first and foremost is that we need to ensure that we get the highest
 reasonable level of cleanup on that site," he said. 

 At the moment, the DOE is obligated to make sure water leaving the site is
 safe and also that soil is clean enough that someone who runs there every
 day doesn't have a seriously elevated cancer risk. 

 But activists and local leaders were astonished when the government
 announced its cleanup level in 1996: The agency would only clean up soils
 contaminated with more than 651 picocuries of plutonium per gram of soil.
 On average, untainted Colorado soils register at 0.04 picocuries per gram,
 so cleanup workers would be allowed to leave behind soils more than 10,000
 times "hotter" than native soils. 

 Citizens clamored loudly, and the federal agency eventually handed them
 $500,000 to redo its calculations. The Rocky Flats Soil Action Level
 Oversight Panel hired John Till of South Carolina's Risk Assessment Corp.
 to do the work. Last year, the panel came out with a strong recommendation:
 To protect the health of future residents, soils should be cleaned to 35
 picocuries per gram. 

 The EPA, state health department and DOE are currently studying the
 recommendation and should decide by next year whether the current number,
 651, is safe. 

 If he's right, it will cost more to clean up the site, and it will take
 longer. 

 Kaiser-Hill managers calculated what it would take to clean up the 903 Pad,
 one of the site's most highly contaminated areas, given different cleanup
 standards. 

 As contracted currently, the 903 Pad project would cost $35 million and
 require soil removal from 5.4 acres, said John Corsi, spokesman for
 Kaiser-Hill. 

 If cleanup level drops from 651 to 115 picocuries per gram, it would cost
 almost $48 million for soil removal from 19 acres. And if the level drops
 all the way to 35 picocuries/gram, the project would cost $75 million and
 require excavation of 50 acres of soil. 

 Paul Golan, deputy manager of Rocky Flats for DOE, said that regardless of
 such unknowns, Rocky Flats can be cleaned up entirely by 2006. "We honestly
 believe that," he said. "It is going to be extremely difficult and there's
 a lot we need to learn to get it done by then." 

 Kaiser-Hill president Bob Card said that although his company calculates
 only a 20 percent chance of meeting the 2006 goal, the likelihood is
 getting better by the month, as cleanup projects are completed. "We intend
 to do it," he said. 

 But former Flats worker Jim Kelly doesn't think it's possible. 

 Kelly, 67, worked at Rocky Flats for 44 years and said the place
 disillusioned him. In the past, U.S. Energy Department managers lied about
 accidents at the site, and Kelly's not convinced anyone knows the extent of
 real contamination there. "I'm the guy that blew the whistle on the
 trenches and the drums that were buried," Kelly said. "There's still stuff
 buried, there's still contamination, and when they begin to disturb it,
 it's going to show its ugly head again." 

 (Contact Katy Human of the Daily Camera in Boulder, Co., at
 http://www.bouldernews.com.)
 Copyright © 2000 Scripps Howard News Service 
 Copyright © 1999-2000, The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. 


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