Honoring Kristen Iversen’s FULL BODY BURDEN: GROWING UP IN THE NUCLEAR SHADOW OF ROCKY FLATS. Good karma and bad.

Every year in the spring the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability presents awards in Washington, DC, to those who have made major contributions over the previous year to efforts to end production of nuclear weapons and get responsible management of nuclear waste and the maximum possible cleanup of contaminated sites. One award presented on April 16, 2013, went to Kristen Iversen for her book, FULL BODY BURDEN: GROWING UP IN THE NUCLEAR SHADOW OF ROCKY FLATS. I had the honor of presenting this award. Here is the text of my remarks honoring her.

It is my distinct pleasure to present an ANA award to Kristen Iversen. Kristen, as many here know, last year published to great acclaim a book called Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. This beautifully written work intertwines two very personal narratives, one of life within a dysfunctional family residing in a sort of suburban paradise, the other one of gradually awakening to what it means to live immediately downwind of a dysfunctional nuclear weapons plant. No recent work in this field has attracted so large a readership so quickly. Critics are set back by its close documentation, especially on matters of ongoing controversy, while the open-hearted are won over by Kristen’s very direct communication.

I wish to address Kristen’s relation to karma. I refer not to her sister, Karma, but to the Hindu/Buddhist principle that what has been sown in past lives is reaped in present and future ones. People often think of karma as simply an individual matter, but it’s also a social reality, a very profound one. A society reaps what it has sown. It brings its fate upon itself. A given society – say the society of the USA – is at any given moment the inevitable and irrevocable product of its past. The culture of a society, the collective human habit of its people, shapes that society for good or ill.

Thus the USA of 2013 is a karmic expression of our imperial, racist, patriarchal, genocidal and ecocidal past. The nuclear menace that ANA addresses is a fateful expression of what has gone before. It exists not simply because our government corralled the scientists who could produce the bomb at just the time we had the political leadership willing, even eager, to use it, so use it we did to the applause of most of the people, who thereafter, with few exceptions, willingly paid the taxes to keep the nuclear behemoth alive, decade after decade, despite the local hazard and the global threat. We had conquered a continent; we could conquer the world. Collectively, some very large portion of the people of the USA created the karmic fate that now confronts us. How we respond creates the karma future generations must deal with.

Enter Kristen Iversen, a very gifted woman who applies her gifts in a frank, honest, compelling and compassionate addressing of the bad karma that Rocky Flats demonstrates. In Colorado, we are just now experiencing a renaissance of activism focused on the poisonous legacy of the defunct Rocky Flats nuclear bomb plant. We are witnessing a new awakening of people who, very much because of Kristen Iversen, have a deep awareness of the karmic harm rendered by the DOE, its contractors and its regulators at Rocky Flats. And they are saying NO. Kristen’s good karma is already manifesting itself.

Thank you, Kristen.

Rocky Flats and the Risk Society

In 1992 German social analyst Ulrich Beck offered a compelling critique of modern industrial society with his book Risk Society. As articulated by Beck, a “risk society” is one in which risks

• are readily produced by human action,
• are officially regarded as minor, and
• are widely accepted by those affected.

This seamless disregard for risk is mirrored in the behavior of the several government agencies that bear official responsibility for conditions at Rocky Flats. Now, whether they support opening the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge to the public or clear the way for construction of the proposed Jefferson Parkway along the eastern, most-contaminated edge of the Rocky Flats site, they repeatedly tell the public:

1. that operations in the past at Rocky Flats contaminated the environment with plutonium and other toxins;
2. that the agencies responsible for public health regard present conditions on and off the site as “safe”; and
3. that the public has therefore no reason for worry.

Beck presents a strong alternative to this disregard for risk. I believe we should carefully consider what he and others in accord with his view have to say. To begin with, the risks to which he refers typically are posed by contaminants that cannot be seen, tasted or smelled. This kind of risk is a relatively new phenomenon; its nuclear form dates only from the 1940s. In the case of Rocky Flats, the principal contaminant is plutonium in the form of minute radioactive particles released into the environment as a result of routine operations and accidents at the now defunct nuclear bomb factory.

The distinctive feature of our modern “risk society” is that the risk is ecological. It damages and destroys the natural ecosystem to which we belong and on which we depend for our very existence, but it does this not immediately but over the long-term.

In The Turning Point (1982) physicist Fritjof Capra of the University of California in Berkeley said that because of the toxicity and 24,000-year half-life of plutonium 239 (used in abundance at Rocky Flats), it should be isolated from the environment for 500,000 years. At Rocky Flats the plutonium was not isolated from the environment but was deposited in it. Because a ceiling was put on how much could be spent on the Superfund “cleanup” of the plutonium-contaminated Rocky Flats site, those responsible for the cleanup finished the job quickly because they made no effort to remove the maximum amount possible of this toxic material. An unknown quantity was purposefully left behind. That plutonium was left behind is bad enough; that the amount left behind has not been quantified makes matters worse.

Plutonium emits alpha radiation. Unlike other forms of radiation, such as gamma rays and x-rays, alpha particles cannot penetrate skin, but when plutonium particles find their way into the body, the damage they create can be much greater than damage caused by x-rays and gamma rays. Plutonium particles lodged within the body steadily bombard surrounding tissue with radiation, very likely for the rest of one’s life. Over time, the result may be cancer, a compromised immune system or some other ailment, including genetic harm that can be transmitted to future generations.

“The black star in the middle of this picture shows the tracks made by alpha rays emitted from a particle of plutonium-239 in the lung tissue of an ape. The alpha rays do not travel very far, but once inside the body, they can penetrate more than 10,000 cells within their range. This set of alpha tracks (magnified 500 times) occurred over a 48-hour period” (Robert Del Tredici, At Work in the Fields of the Bomb [1987], plate 39).

Herman Muller was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1946 for his discovery that radiation damage could affect future generations. He predicted gradual reduction of humankind’s survival ability due to exposure to radiation over multiple generations (“Radiation and Heredity,” American Journal of Public Health, 1964). His work suggests that radiation introduced into the world by humans may in time destroy our species. A British research team concluded that chromosomal damage from plutonium exposure is essentially “infinite,” because the extent of harm to the human gene pool is incalculable (M. A. Khadim et al., Nature, Feb. 1992). Commenting on the work of Khadim’s group, science writer Rob Edwards observed that the resultant “genomic instability” may account for illnesses other than cancer, illnesses so elusive that epidemiology is “powerless” to detect any relationship between their incidence and exposure to radiation (New Scientist, vol. 11, Oct. 1997, pp. 37-40).

Distribution of plutonium contamination from Rocky Flats in becquerels per square meter (one becquerel equals one disintegration or burst of radiation per second). The original version of this map was prepared by P. W. Krey and E. P. Hardy of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Health and Safety Laboratory, New York City, and published in their 1970 report, “Plutonium in Soil Around the Rocky Flats Plant,” HASL 235. Sampling done in September 2011 along Indiana St. by independent scientist Marco Kaltofen showed that present deposits of plutonium are roughly equivalent to the levels measured by Krey and Hardy in 1970. The dotted red line shows the route of the proposed Jefferson Parkway.

What is clear is that the official incautious attitude toward the plutonium remaining in the environment at Rocky Flats after completion of what DOE has called its “risk-based cleanup” means we are gambling with people’s lives now and into the deep future. The government agencies that approved hazardous conditions at Rocky Flats and removed most of the site from the national Superfund list are prime exemplars of the risk society. When they tell us that the contaminants left in the environment are “safe,” what they mean is that they meet official standards for permissible exposure. They rarely emphasize that exposure standards by their very nature allow some level of risk. Besides, their ways of calculating risk do not take into account the enormous range of individual susceptibility to exposure to radiation. What doesn’t harm one may very well harm another.

Of course, those who establish and enforce standards for permissible exposure know as well as I do that the National Academy of Sciences, in its series of studies on Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation, has repeatedly concluded, most recently in 2006 (BEIR VII), that any exposure to radiation is potentially harmful. This means there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation, something that Karl Z. Morgan, “the father of health physics” at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, concluded during his studies that began with the Manhattan Project. And those who set and enforce standards for Rocky Flats must certainly be familiar with the British “Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters” which concluded in 2004 that the cancer risk from very low-doses of plutonium may be ten or more times more dangerous than allowed for by existing exposure standards (see http://www.cerrie.org).

This last point is strongly reinforced from a different angle by research done by Tom K. Hei and colleagues of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. They demonstrated that a single plutonium alpha particle induces mutations in mammalian cells. Cells receiving very low doses were more likely to be damaged than destroyed. Replication of these damaged cells constitutes genetic harm, and more such harm per unit dose occurs at very low doses than would occur with higher dose exposures. “These data,” they concluded, “provide direct evidence that a single alpha particle traversing a nucleus will have a high probability of resulting in a mutation and highlight the need for radiation protection at low doses” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 94, Apr. 1997). In a follow-up study, they found that “a single alpha particle can induce mutations and chromosome aberrations in [adjacent] cells that received no direct radiation exposure to their DNA,” what is often referred to as “the bystander effect” (Ibid, vol. 98, 4 Dec. 2001).

During more than a decade that I served on oversight and advisory bodies focused on Rocky Flats, when I asked government personnel responsible for public health at Rocky Flats about such studies, I typically got a blank stare, as if I’d trespassed into sacred space for which they held sole responsibility.

For several years I was privileged to be a member of two committees of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), a non-government body that researches radiation health effects and makes recommendations to government and industry regarding exposure standards. I hoped, as a token outsider, that I could persuade this elite body of radiation health specialists to open their deliberations to people directly affected by the exposure standards they were calculating, such as workers in the nuclear industry and people who live or work near nuclear installations. Two activist colleagues and I were invited to make a presentation at the NCRP annual meeting in 2003; there was a vigorous dismissal of what we proposed. Our paper was later published, under the title “Stakeholder Perspectives on Radiation Protection” (Lisa Ledwidge, LeRoy Moore and Lisa Crawford in Health Physics, Sept. 2004). It garnered zero feedback. I soon thereafter resigned from the committees to which I had belonged.

The author at Indiana St. and 96^th Ave. (SE corner of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge) on a windy day, June 17, 2011. The proposed Jefferson Parkway would pass directly through the spot where he stands. Nearby is earth moved for the Candelas development slated to run across the southern edge of the Rocky Flats site. Photo by Robert Del Tredici.

Regarding those responsible for radiation exposure standards, Beck observes: “Whoever limits pollution has also concurred in it.” Official exposure standards “may indeed prevent the very worst from happening, but they are at the same time ‘blank checks’ to poison nature and mankind a bit” (Risk Society, p. 64). In other words, we give the agencies charged with protecting public health permission to poison us. Because susceptibility to toxins varies widely, who can say which one of us will be among the vulnerable that receive a lethal dose?

Without question, those most vulnerable to plutonium are human infants and children. This is so because:

• A human child is more likely than an adult to stir up dust, to eat dirt, to breathe in gasps, or to scrape a knee or elbow — all ways of taking tiny particles of plutonium into the body.
• Since a child’s body is smaller than an adult’s, internalized plutonium has more damaging power because the ratio of plutonium to body mass is significantly greater,
• Plutonium within a child’s body integrates with the child’s growth and tissue development.
• By contrast to adult humans or other beings, a child’s normal life span provides far more time for internalized alpha emitters to harm her or his health.

In the face of an environment at Rocky Flats contaminated with plutonium particles too small to see but not too small to do damage, the vulnerability of children was a major reason 81% of the 1,280 parties commenting in 2004 told U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service not to allow public access to the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Only 11% of commenting parties explicitly favored access. U.S. Fish & Wildlife (sometimes called “Fission Wildlife”) ignored this expression of public opinion and approved access (see U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge: Appendix H, Comments and Responses on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Sept. 2004; for analysis, see http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org/required-reading/public-rejects-refuge-access/ ).                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Beck points out that the afflictions posed by high-tech and ecological risks “have a new quality,” in that “they are no longer tied to their place of origin, the industrial plant. By their nature they endanger all forms of life on this planet.” This is especially true of nuclear pollutants, because “they outlast generations” and transcend space as well as time in that the harmful material has been and will continue to be carried by the wind great distances. Borders are no barriers to the free movement of invisible particles. “In the risk society, the unknown and unintended consequences come to be a dominant force in history and society” (Risk Society, p. 22).

The foregoing doesn’t square with the “cleanup” done at Rocky Flats, based as it was on the assumption that plutonium left behind will not migrate. This conclusion, reached by the multi-year Actinide Migration Evaluation done at the site, was derived from computer modeling more than from empirical observation. But there are numerous empirical observations to counter this conclusion. The two most notable are (1) Dr. M. Iggy Litaor’s direct detection with field instruments of significant surface and sub-surface migration of plutonium in the unusually wet spring of 1995, and (2) ecologist Shawn Smallwood’s 1996 study of burrowing animals at Rocky Flats. Smallwood identified 18 species that dig 10 to 16 feet below the surface and constantly take surface material down and bring buried material up, in the process disturbing in any given year as much as 11 to 12% of surface soil and doing so in a completely unpredictable way, making plutonium particles available for redistribution by wind, rain, traffic, animal, human and other forces (for references and more detail, see “Science compromised,” at http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org/leroy-moores-blog/papers-by-leroy-moore-phd-2/ ).

Residential development just off Indiana St. near the southeast corner of the Rocky Flats site. Photo by Robert Del Tredici, May 2011.

An unfortunate characteristic of risk society is that most scientists, especially in the nuclear field, have allied themselves with the centers of power in industry and government. The late Karl Z. Morgan, the “father of health physics” referred to earlier, exemplified this situation. He pioneered the field of radiation safety as part of the Manhattan Project and was for nearly thirty years head of health physics at the Oak Ridge National Lab. He was a founder of both the International Commission on Radiation Protection and the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the two leading bodies responsible for recommending standards for permissible exposures to ionizing radiation. And he founded the Health Physics Society to protect people. Originally he and others in this new field believed that there was a threshold of radiation exposure below which harm would not occur, but he came to realize that there is no such thing as a safe dose and, crucially, that exposures at very low doses are more harmful per unit dose than exposures at higher doses. Toward the end of his long career he proposed reducing the maximum allowable lifetime plutonium body burden for nuclear workers 200-fold (American Industrial Hygiene Association Journal, August 1975). His proposal was ignored. After his retirement from the Oak Ridge Lab members of the Health Physics Society treated him as persona non grata. His autobiography, The Angry Genie, explains how this organization came to be dominated by those more interested in protecting the industry rather than the exposed. He cites the moment when a president of the Health Physics Society told his colleagues, “Let’s all put our mouth where our money is” (Morgan and Ken M. Peterson, The Angry Genie: One Man’s Walk through the Nuclear Age, 1998, pp. 115-116).

Carl J. Johnson studied cancer incidence for 1969-1971 among Anglos in three areas downwind of Rocky Flats defined by levels of plutonium contamination in millicuries per square kilometer as compared to the uncontaminated control Area IV. Area I on this map showed 16% more cancer then the non-contaminated area, Area II 12% more cancer, and Area III 6% more (Johnson, “Cancer Incidence in an Area Contaminated with Radionuclides Near a Nuclear Installation,” AMBIO, 10, 4, October 1981, p. 177).

Colorado was fortunate to have an outstanding public health servant in the person of Carl J. Johnson, MD, for several years Director of the Jefferson County Health Department. His best-known study, published in 1981 in Ambio, the journal of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, showed a direct correspondence between areas of plutonium contamination across the Denver metro area and cancer incidence within those same areas, as shown on the map above. Though both the DOE and the State Health Department tried unsuccessfully to discredit this report, it remains as a work of integrity. By the time the study was actually published, however, real estate interests had gained the upper hand within the Jefferson County Commissioners and forced Johnson out of his job. (For a detailed analysis of Johnson’s work, see “Democracy and Public Health at Rocky Flats,” at http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org/leroy-moores-blog/papers-by-leroy-moore-phd-2/ ).

Finally, Ulrich Beck says, “Risks of modernization sooner or later also strike those who produce or profit from them. They contain a boomerang effect, which breaks up the pattern of class and national society. Ecological disaster and atomic fallout ignore the borders of nations. Even the rich and powerful are not safe from them” (Risk Society, p. 23). As the effects of the risk society proliferate, populations will be increasingly divided between “the affected” and “the not-yet affected.” Beck’s prognosis for the risk society’s future is more pointed than Muller’s prediction of genetic collapse. “The escalating scarcity of health will drive even those still well off today into the ranks of the ‘soup kitchens’ . . . tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow into the pariah community of the invalid and the wounded. . . Freedom from risk can turn overnight into irreversible affliction.” (Risk Society, p. 40)

Beck points to the necessity for fundamental cultural change, what eco-philosopher Joanna Macy and others refer to as “the great turning” from environmental risk-taking to ecological responsibility. Such a change happens as affected people — and we are all affected — awaken to the dangers of our risk society and join with others to do something about it. The Rocky Flats Nuclear Guardianship project of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center is devoted to this end. The first principle of the Nuclear Guardianship Ethic is: “Each generation shall endeavor to preserve the foundations of life and well-being for those who come after. To produce and abandon substances that damage following generations is morally unacceptable.” We invite others to join us in the work of Guardianship (see http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org ).

Petition opposing Jefferson Parkway and public access to the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge

Marcella MacDonald of Superior has produced a petition opposing the Jefferson Parkway and public access to the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge. Signed copies will go to elected officials in city, county, state and federal governments. Here is the text:

Building a tolled four-lane highway and future hiking and biking trails on Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, formerly Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, will cause plutonium and other radioactive materials to be released into the air, soil and water endangering the health, safety and well-being of surrounding communities.  We need to set a precedent to every superfund site that any development on former nuclear sites is not acceptable!

Please sign this petition. To do so, go to  https://www.change.org/petitions/stop-the-building-of-a-toll-road-trails-and-bike-paths-on-rocky-flats-wildlife-refuge

Rocky Flats: Offsite Contamination and Public Health: Remembering the Work of Ed Martell and Carl Johnson

Two independent scientists did the most to inform people of the Denver area about public health dangers  of plutonium released from the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. After a fire on Mother’s Day 1969 at Rocky Flats, radiochemist Edward A. Martell of the the National Center for Atmospheric Research was the first  to bring to the attention of an unknowing public that their lives were endangered by plutonium released into the off-site environment from the plant. Carl J. Johnson, MD, for several years chief public health officer of Jefferson County where Rocky Flats is located, showed empirically that the Colorado Department of Health was providing misleading data to the public regarding levels of contamination and that there was a link between contamination  levels and cancer incidence. Through the 1970s these two individuals informed and inspired participants in the rapidly growing movement of resistance calling for an end to production at Rocky Flats.

Earlier this year, in a book called Tortured Science: Health Studies, Ethics, and Nuclear Weapons in the United States, I published an article that details the contributions of Martell and Johnson, activity for which each paid dearly. The article explains why what they revealed about contamination from Rocky Flats is still relevant today. It exposes the failure of the government’s cost-benefit risk-analysis approach to public health at nuclear facilities and makes an appeal for a wholly new practice of “ecological democracy.” Entitled “Democracy and Public Health at Rocky Flats,” the article is available on line at http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org/leroy-moores-blog/papers-by-leroy-moore-phd-2/

An engineer’s view of Building 371, Rocky Flats’ most expensive failure

Thomas Bullock’sDiary of a Cold War Patriot (Smashwords, Inc., 2011, available on line at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/74199) narrates the career of a retired nuclear engineer who was involved in several projects at Rocky Flats when he worked for Parsons Corp., an engineering firm located in Pasadena, CA. One project that actually played a role in the end of production at Rocky Flats was the effort to correct design problems that plagued Bldg. 371. Bldg. 371, which opened in 1981, was intended as a “state of the art” replacement for the outmoded and quite dangerous Bldg.771, the plant’s original plutonium pit fabrication facility. The plutonium workhorse at Rocky Flats, Bldg. 771 opened in 1952. It was the location of the disastrous fire of September 11, 1957, that resulted in the largest single release of plutonium to the external environment.

Bullock calls Bldg. 371 “a $250 million white elephant” (that’s 1980 dollars). Anyone who has seen Dark Circle, a documentary about Rocky Flats, may recall a scene where dignitaries from Washington were on hand at Rocky Flats for the dedication of a new building. The film show a robot moving forward to cut a ribbon to signify readiness of the new facility. The robot malfunctioned before it did its job and the ribbon fell to the floor. This scene was the perfect unintended metaphor for Bldg. 371, for very soon after startup the building became contaminated throughout and had to be shut down. Bullock was brought in from the outside to lead a $60 million ultimately unsuccessful effort to get the building back into operation. Thus the newest, most robust, most expensive building in Rocky Flats history was never used for the work for which it was created.

Not long after the June 1989 FBI raid on Rocky Flats to gather evidence of environmental lawbreaking at the plant, the Secretary of Energy announced that production had been “temporarily” halted at the facility. The DOE soon proposed the “Plutonium Recovery Modification Project” (PRMP),  a very expensive plan to renovate Bldg. 371. This project was the lynchpin for resumed production at Rocky Flats. Activists, some of whom had engaged in repeated civil disobedience to protest bomb-making at Rocky Flats, were suddenly lobbying Congress not to to fund the PRMP.  In 1990 Congress, following the lead of the Colorado congressional delegation, voted against the PRMP,  a decision that made resumed production unlikely. In 1992 the Rocky Flats mission was changed from production to cleanup.

Depleted Uranium Work at Rocky Flats: An example of the “Black Budget”

Secrets abound at Rocky Flats, some more secret than others. One such was activity to develop depleted uranium armor plating for U.S. Army tanks. Initially deployed in West Germany during the 1980s, tanks with DU armor became notable for their use in the two U.S. wars in Iraq. This particular project was totally unknown to outsiders like myself who followed activities at Rocky Flats very closely. I learned of the existence of this program from Thomas Bullock’s Diary of a Cold War Patriot (Smashwords, Inc., 2011, available on line at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/74199). This book narrates the career of a retired nuclear engineer, who, when employed by Parsons Corp., an engineering firm located in Pasadena, CA, was involved in several projects at Rocky Flats, including the DU work. As mentioned above, this was a “black budget” item, that is, one not included in the regular publicly available DOE budget line, one for which even the existence of the budget was totally classified.

Bullock does not say whether the DU work at Rocky Flats also included coating bullets, shells and missiles with DU. Both forms of DU armor, coating for projectiles and coating for tanks, created radioactive contamination in Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq and later Afghanistan and other locations. U.S. soldiers in DU armored tanks that were targeted and hit often were exposed to radiation in easily internalized aerosol form. Of course, DU also contaminated populations where it was used, including totally innocent civilians. Some critics called DU the “agent orange” of Iraq. According to Physicians for Social Responsibility, “The fact that DU is aerosolized on impact with its target and is transformed into small dust particles capable of being carried by the wind may threaten air, ground and water resources, which all may become long-term repositories for DU. Long term impact is especially important considering the 4.5 billion year half life of DU.”

Bullock reports that once the DU tank armament developed at Rocky Flats was ready for application, the work was shifted to the Idaho National Engineering Lab, where it was housed in the enormous building originally built there for the failed effort to create a nuclear powered airplane. This facility was large enough that tanks could be delivered to a place where they could be out of sight while being coated with DU armor.  He doesn’t say whether the Idaho work was also “black budget.”

In 1993, after the change of mission at Rocky Flats from production to cleanup, for a brief period DOE pushed what was called the “Rocky Flats Conversion Project.” a name that they must have expected to resonate with anti-nuclear activists who for two decades had been calling for conversion of work at Rocky Flats from socially destructive to socially useful activity. The Rocky Flats Conversion Project was to be operated by a commercial company headquarter in Oak Ridge, TN. Their intent was to do DU work of an unspecified nature. They wanted to take over one building at Rocky Flats that happened to contain a very large, very heavy rolling metal press, capable of creating large sheets of DU at varying thicknesses. For a brief period, this Conversion Project received a good bit of attention. But within a matter of a few months, without much public notice, the project was suddenly de-funded. It disappeared like a bad dream, never to be mentioned again. I of course now wonder if the Rocky Flats Conversion Project was related to DU armaments.

Rocky Flats: What Colorado Department of Health knew all along but didn’t tell the public

People familiar with the history of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant know that tbe Mother’s Day 1969 fire marks a turning point in public awareness of Rocky Flats as a local hazard to people of the Denver metro area. On the day of the fire some people knew that a big fire occurred at the facility. One such person was Ed Martell, a radiochemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. Martell had done radiation monitoring for the Army in some of the nuclear tests that happened in the South Pacific after World War II. He knew that the principal product of the Rocky Flats plant was the plutonium “pit” that formed the fissile core of every nuclear warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. And he knew that  inhaling minute particles of plutonium was the most dangerous way to be exposed to this exceedingly toxic material, since particles lodged in the body constantly irradiate surrounding tissue, probably for the rest of a person’s life. Moreover, since the half-life of plutonium-239, the form used at Rocky Flats, is 24,110 years, any quantity of this material in the environment poses an essentially permanent danger.

Knowing all this, after the Mother’s Day 1969 fire he asked authorities at Rocky Flats to test soil for plutonium in areas downwind of the plant. When they declined, he and a colleague, S.E. Poet, collected soil samples themselves and analyzed them for plutonium content. In February 1970 they met with officials from Rocky Flats and the Colorado Department of Health to inform them that they had found elevated levels of plutonium at several offsite locations. They assumed that what they found came from the 1969 fire. Rocky Flats personnel, however, told them that very little plutonium was released in the 1969 fire and thus that what they found came either from a major fire that happened in September 1957 or from leaks from drums of plutonium-bearing waste that had been stored outdoors for more than a decade in the 903 area at the plant site.

As a result of Martell and Poet’s work, the public suddenly learned for the first time of these major releases of plutonium from Rocky Flats. I personally along with others in the activist community assumed that this was also when the state government learned about these releases, the largest in the history of operations at Rocky Flats. But on Thursday, June 21, 2012, in a discussion of the 1969 fire with several former Rocky Flats employees, a man who had been at Rocky Flats from the very beginning of work there bristled at my assertion that it was at the February 1970 meeting with Martell and Poet that the Colorado Department of Health first learned about the 1957 fire and the 903 area releases. He said State Health knew about the 1957 fire from the time it happened. He mentioned Al Hazle, said “we talked to him all the time,” adding, “If the public didn’t know, that means the State Health Department didn’t tell them.”

This really surprised me because the mythology absorbed by the activists over the years is that not only the public but also the state government did not know about releases of plutonium from Rocky Flats prior to the 1969 fire. Al Hazle, whom we knew as the spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Health, always seemed like “Mr. Innocent.”

Colorado Department of Health is now known as the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

U.S. Department of TLC: Pertinent for Rocky Flats

Everyone knows what TLC means. Right? Well, maybe not. The envisioned U.S. Department of TLC (Toxic Land/Labor Conservation Service), projected to be housed in the Department of the Interior, will work with grassroots movements, non-governmental organizations and affected individuals already involved in “ending government unaccountability concerning the domestic effects of the American nuclear state. The legacy of secrecy, denial, mis-information and sacrifice that characterize Cold War government operations requires vigilant detection and continual exposition. To that end, the national TLC Service was founded to carry out the discovery  — in perpetuity — of ways to care for lands, attend to labor histories, and explore the linkages between bodies,, enviroments, and exposures. The current transformation of the nuclear complex . . . is an important opportunity to practice government differently, and to create another legacy altogether.” The Dept. of TLC will involve environmentalists, artists, nuclear workers, activists, Native communities and scholars to address the most urgent cultural and environmental justice issues regarding post-military, post-nuclear landscapes.

The initial step toward creation of the Dept. of TLC was the establishment on May 1,  2011, of the National TLC Service. The first directors of the National TLC Service are Sarah Kanouse, an artist based at the University of Iowa, and Shiloh Krupar, a cultural geographer who teaches at Georgetown University. Kanouse’s work seeks to undermine and alter spacial practices in politicized landscapes, such as military bases or nuclear installations. Krupar focuses on the politics of conservation, memory of place and environmental justice issues, including the unseen medical geographies of waste and interfaces of the body with cancer detection technology. The audacity of Kanouse and Krupar in creating the fictional/wishful National TLC Service displays a scintillating combination of political conscience and wry humor. May their tribe increase.

Of course, Rocky Flats is on their list of sites in need of TLC Service. Those of us involved with establishing Nuclear Guardianship at Rocky Flats applaud these TLC developments. See www.RockyFlatsNuclearGuardianship

To learn more about TLC, visit these sites:

http://www.nationaltlcservice.us/

http://theiwt.com/proposals/artists-national-tlc-service/

http://flawedart.net/ecocultures/projects.html (a recent exhibition)

Rocky Flats: Shiloh Krupar and Nuclia Waste

Quite by accident I recently came across Shiloh R. Krupar’s “Transnatural ethics: revisiting the nuclear cleanup of Rocky Flats, CO, through the queer ecology of Nuclia Waste,” Cultural Geographies, May 24, 2012.

I found the article dense, provocative and congenial. In an email message, Krupar, a Georgetown University geographer, describes the article as a bit of an awkward “sandwiching of empirical case-study material on the RF cleanup, with more philosophical speculation on environmental ethics.” She critiques the ethic that guided the Rocky Flats cleanup for “eliminating uncertainty” and assuming that nature is “static and separate from the human.” Those who did the cleanup, she notes, assumed erroneously that nuclear waste left behind will stay put. This made it possible for them to view and to invite others to view the resultant Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge as pristine rather than contaminated. Contrary to this dreamlike misperception Krupar says we no longer experience “pure nature” and thus must adopt a “transnatural ethic” that “directs attention toward the impurifications already in existence” and grounds responsibility in awareness of a broader human/nature kinship. She cites the antics of Denver drag queen Nuclia Waste as an example of the cognitive transformation required. Her paper is on line at http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/05/24/1474474011433756.abstract?patientinform-links=yes&legid=spcgj;1474474011433756v1  An abundance of information about Nuclia Waste can also be found on the web.

Krupar says she grew up  in Richland, WA, right next door to the DOE’s Hanford facility where plutonium was produced for Rocky Flats, then later in Lakewood, CO, with her family working at Rocky Flats. While she was doing graduate work in geography at the University of California, Berkeley, she began to think about her “embeddedness” in these places.

I will write another blog entry about a remarkable project Shiloh Krupar is doing with Sarah Kranouse of Iowa University. Look for the U.S. Department of TLC.

Rocky Flats: What about those 65 cartons of evidence?

The FBI raided the Rocky Flats nuclear bomb plant on June 6, 1989, to collect evidence of alleged environmental lawbreaking by plant operator Rockwell International. A Special Grand Jury that spent two-and-a-half years reviewing the evidence in the case called operations at the site “an ongoing criminal enterprise” and called for indictment of several DOE and Rockwell officials. On March 26, 1992, the Department of Justice, however, bypassed the grand jury and announced an out-of-court settlement with Rockwell in which the company pleaded guilty to relatively minor offenses, paid a fine and was absolved of any other wrongdoing. The judge in the case ordered the grand jurors not to reveal anything they had learned in their investigation, and he sealed 65 cartons of documents from the case in the Denver federal courthouse.

In March 2004 Wes McKinley, foreman of the grand jury that reviewed the evidence in the case against Rockwell, and attorney Caron Balkany published The Ambushed Grand Jury, in which they assert that the real purpose of the grand jury investigation was not to prosecute the principal crimes committed at Rocky Flats but to cover them up. They accordingly called for public access to the 65 cartons of documents sealed by court order. After all, the Superfund cleanup at Rocky Flats was nearing completion, and the government agencies responsible for the cleanup had not reviewed the documents in these cartons. This triggered several months of  juggling over the 65 cartons.

In May 2004 then-U.S. Attorney John Suthers (now Colorado Attorney General) announced he’d consider making some of the contents of these cartons available to federal and state regulators of the cleanup. He specified that he meant ­ only documents collected during the FBI raid, not later testimony before the grand jury. Then-Rep. Mark Udall, in whose district Rocky Flats was located, had asked Suthers to make this material available to the regulators, that is, EPA and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). All this was duly reported in the media.

Three months later Ann Imse, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, reported that no one from EPA or CDPHE had asked to review the documents. Spokespersons for these agencies said they did not want to go through all those documents.

In the midst of this backing and forthing regarding the sealed documents, on August 18 former Rocky Flats worker Jacque Brever appeared at a news conference with Wes McKinley and Caron Balkany. At this event, she released a closely documented report alleging that some nuclear waste in the environment at Rocky Flats will not be cleaned up because DOE had provided misleading information to the EPA and CDPHE. http://www.utwatch.org/war/jacquebrever_rockyflatscleanup.html On September 2, the DC-based trade paper Inside Energy quoted a letter sent to Brever by a DOE official at Rocky Flats saying that “no new information about the nature and extent of the environmental contamination at the Site is contained in your paper” and that every area mentioned by Brever had been investigated and included in the cleanup plans for the site. The Inside Energy article contains this telling sentence from Attorney Caron Balkany: “DOE does not deny our documentation that it submitted false data” to the regulators. I read the Rocky Flats official’s letter to Brever at the time that it was sent. It consists wholly of empty assertions devoid of documentation or substantiation of any sort. On that same day, September 2, the Boulder Daily Camera carried an AP article covering much of the same ground as the Inside Energy piece, though the Camera quotes Jon Lipsky, who had led the 1989 FBI raid on Rocky Flats, saying that Brever’s “report was correct.”

What now can be said about the 65 cartons of documents from the FBI raid and the grand jury investigation of Rockwell?

• First, we know that the FBI raid and subsequent grand jury investigation focused on possible violation of federal environmental laws at Rocky Flats.
• Second, we do not know if the 65 cartons of documents that remain sealed in the Denver federal courthouse contain data that should have been reviewed by those responsible for the Superfund cleanup at Rocky Flats. We do know that in 2006 EPA and CDPHE certified the cleanup without ever reviewing these documents, though they had been given the opportunity to review at least some of them.
• Third, given the remarks by Brever and Lipsky and others not cited here (especially some former Rocky Flats workers who recorded their complaints in the Rocky Flats Oral History Project; go to http://www.boulderlibrary.org/oralhistory/ and see Rocky Flats under Special Collections), it is not irrational to want public access to those 65 cartons of documents. I specifically say public access, not government access, because the government agencies responsible for the cleanup at Rocky Flats have already let us down.
• Fourth, until the public has unfettered access to the sealed 65 cartons of documents, there can be no conclusion that the cleanup done at Rocky Fats is adequate, much less that the site is safe. An invisible cloud hangs over everything having to do with Rocky Flats.