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.

Carl Johnson’s cancer incidence study: In a 1981 study Carl Johnson divided the Denver region into three areas of higher to lower contamination of soil with plutonium released from Rocky Flats and a fourth non-contaminated area. Using data from the National Cancer Institute for 1969-1971, he demonstrated a relation between areas of contamination and cancer incidence in those same areas. The most contaminated area nearest Rocky Flats had 16% more cancer than the non-contaminated area, the intermediate area 10% more cancers, and the contaminated area furthest from Rocky Flats 6% more cancers. (Johnson, “Cancer Incidence in an Area Contaminated with Radionuclides Near a Nuclear Installation,” Ambio, 1981, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 176-182)

Feasibility study: In 1982 Nancy A. Dreyer and co-workers reported a feasibility study for an epidemiologic study of persons who lived near the plant. They assumed exposure to plutonium began in 1967 and concluded that, based on the environmental data they analyzed, exposures were not high enough to be evaluated with statistical analyses in an epidemiologic study. (Dreyer et al., “The Feasibility of Epidemiologic Studies of Cancer in Residents Near the Rocky Flats Plant,” Health Physics, 1982 vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 65-68)

John Cobb’s autopsy study: In a study that began in 1975 C. U. Medical School professor John C. Cobb and colleagues from EPA measured plutonium concentrations in autopsy samples from more than 500 persons who died in Colorado. They compared those who lived near Rocky Flats with those who lived far from the site and found higher concentrations of plutonium in lung and liver tissue for people who lived near the plant. (Cobb et al., “Plutonium Burdens in People Living Around the Rocky Flats Plant,” March 1983, EPA-600/4-82-069, Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service)[1]

Crump’s response to Johnson: In 1987 a DOE-funded study by Kenneth S. Crump et al. responded to Carl Johnson’s cancer incidence study. Using the same data and methodology that he used, they replicated his results, but said they found no evidence of “a relation between environmental exposure to plutonium from Rocky Flats and cancer incidence.” They advanced the thesis that cancer rates were highest in inner city Denver due to the “urban effect” rather than proximity to Rocky Flats. To reach this conclusion they abandoned Johnson’s approach and divided the metro area into six equal-sized sectors centered on the State Capitol, then calculated the cancer incidence in each sector. They found that cancer rates in the sector containing Rocky Flats were no higher than other sectors. (Crump et al., “Cancer Incidence Patterns in the Denver Metropolitan Area in Relation to the Rocky Flats Plant,” American Journal of Epidemiology, 1987, vol. 126, no.1, pp. 127-135)[2]

National Cancer Institute study: In 1990, researchers at the National Cancer Institute completed a study of cancer incidence and mortality around 62 nuclear facilities in the U.S. This study compared cancer rates in counties near nuclear facilities, including Rocky Flats, with those for counties farther away. The results show slight elevations for some cancers in some age groups, but these data are hard to interpret because of limited information about other cancer-related factors. For example, Rocky Flats is on the northern edge of Jefferson County, which then had the second highest population of all Colorado counties, only a small portion of which were living where they could be exposed to toxins released from Rocky Flats. (S. Jablon et al., Cancer in Populations Near Nuclear Facilities, NIH Publication No. 90-874. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1990)

Community Needs Assessment: In 1996 nurses at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center conducted a community needs assessment and concluded that community-based epidemiological studies should occur in areas affected by Rocky Flats. (N. J. Brown et al., Rocky Flats community needs assessment final report, Denver: UCHSC School of Nursing, 1996)

Epidemiologist Richard W. Clapp calls for ongoing medical surveillance: In 1996 Boston University epidemiologist, Richard W. Clapp, found excessive incidence of lung and bone cancers in areas near Rocky Flats and concluded that “the most recent data are indicative of an ongoing health effect and support the need for surveillance of the incidence of cancer and other diseases on a continuing basis in the exposed communities.” (Clapp, Report submitted 13 November 1996 for plaintiff’s counsel in Cook vs. Dow Chemical and Rockwell International, United States District Court, District of Colorado)

Colorado Central Cancer Registry report: In 1998, the Colorado Central Cancer Registry staff at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment found that cancer incidence rates for 10 selected regional statistical areas in the general vicinity of the Rocky Flats Plant from 1980-1989 were comparable to those for the rest of the Denver metropolitan area for the same period. (Colorado Central Cancer Registry, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Ratios of Cancer Incidence in Ten Areas Around Rocky Flats, Colorado, compared to the Remainder of Metropolitan Denver, 1980-1989, with Update for Selected Areas, 1990-95)

Historical Public Exposures Studies on Rocky Flats (1990-1999): Otherwise referred to as dose reconstruction studies, the purpose was to identify quantities of contaminants released off-site and the potential health risks posed by these contaminants to nearby communities. The studies attempted to determine if exposures and risks were sufficiently high to be observed in increased cancer rates in the surrounding population. Due to the low levels of exposure, population changes and the fact that no disease can be attributed solely to plutonium, it would be difficult to perform an epidemiologic study. The principal conclusion therefore was that no epidemiological study was warranted. (H. Grogan et al., Technical Summary: Phase II, Rocky Flats Historical Public Exposures Studies, Radiological Assessments Corporation Report No. 14-CDPHE-RF-1999-FINAL, Neeses, South Carolina: Radiological Assessments Corporation, 1999)[3]

• 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 ).

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

How

In May 1948, on the warm night of the last day

of my junior year in high school, when I was 16,

I put an end to my father’s beating me

with a rubber hose.

He’d escalated to this weapon for his wholly

unjustified punishments some years earlier.

On the night in question, as I made my way

through the darkened house toward the room

I shared with my brother,

I sensed my father’s presence before seeing him

with that garden hose doubled over in his hand.

He ordered me to lie down on the bed

as I’d always done.

It suddenly came to me

that I didn’t have to take this any longer.

My refusal triggered a struggle in which he tried

to force me down. I responded by wrapping

my arms around his neck and lifting my feet

from the floor so that I hung deadweight down

the front side of his body, absorbing all his energy.

Within seconds he went limp with exhaustion,

and I removed my arms from around his neck,

ending forever his physical violence toward me.

As the years passed I saw a straight line from

the violence of my father to the violence of my country,

the extremity of the former fortunately no worse than

a rubber hose, but of the latter enough nuclear force

to end human life on Planet Earth several times over.

When in 1978 I learned about Rocky Flats, where

the fissile core of every U.S. nuclear warhead was made,

I sought with others to stop what was done there.

In nonviolence training for my first civil disobedience

at Rocky Flats, we did a role-play called “deadweight”

in which you contain a belligerent person’s behavior

by hanging yourself deadweight down that person’s torso.

Tears burst from my eyes. Amazingly,

what I’d done spontaneously at age 16 was being taught

in carefully choreographed nonviolence training.

My father, I realized, without knowing he was doing so,

had made a great gift to me,

for he had planted within me the seed of nonviolence

and had even brought it to blossom.

As for Rocky Flats, an eventual fruit of the flowering

of nonviolent resistance was to end production there

of nuclear bombs, the extremity of violence.

Lessons

In the Sunday school class for 8-year old boys

at the big church in downtown Dallas,

the teacher, his hand on the Bible

lying open in his lap, suddenly declares:

Watch out for niggers.

They’ll push you off the sidewalk.

This lesson countering everything I’d ever seen

went home with me that Sunday, but

there was no one to talk with about his words

because my mother had died

and no substitute would do.

From around this same time, 1939 or ‘40,

I received another far more vivid lesson

on a rare day of snow in Dallas.

When school let out that afternoon we all

were pummeling one another with snowballs.

Soon my red, red hands were aching so

that I left for the half-mile trek home,

crying, crying, crying with pain.

At Gaston Avenue, a black woman,

who must have been a maid from one

of the big houses nearby, was waiting for a bus.

What’s the matter, boy? Come here, she called.

Rubbing my hands vigorously in hers

and looking me right in the eye, she said,

Listen. I’m going to tell you something.

When you get home put your hands

in cold water and rub them together

till the pain’s all gone.

She paused to let me take it in.

Did you hear what I said?

Repeat it back to me.

I repeated every word.

I didn’t say hot water, did I?

No, you said cold.

You won’t forget what I said, will you?

No, I won’t forget.

Ten minutes later, her voice echoing in my ear,

I rubbed my hands in the stream

of cold water till all the pain was gone.

I never saw her again.

(11-24-12)

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/

“Plutonium is virtually 100 percent soluble in Denver area drinking water because of the presence of carbonate and fluoride in the water.’(1) This was confirmed by the appreciable amounts of plutonium ( 7,000-40,000 times background from world-wlde fallout) found in Denver drinking water as late as 1972. (2, 3)  Concentrations have been smaller since.   The chlorination of water by water districts changes the valency state of plutonium so that its absorption in  the gastrointestinal tract is enhanced by as much as 1750 times (4). In addition, plutonium is absorbed much more readily from the gastrointestinal tract of children, at least 100-fold in children less than one years of age (5), and 1000-fold in nursing animals (6). Moreover, when plutonium is taken up in the food chain and biologically incorporated, absorption is enhanced by  a factor of ten (7).”

The first study Johnson cites (note 2) regarding plutonium solubility was done by J. M. Cleveland, whose authoritative The Chemistry of Plutonium (NY: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, 1970, was written when he was the chief plutonium specialist at Rocky Flats.

Though, as noted, Johnson had called attention to the problem of plutonium in Denver area public water supplies becoming soluble as early as 1980 and then again in 1987 (see notes 1 and 3), the multi-year Actinide Migration Evaluation conducted as part of the Rocky Flats cleanup concluded that plutonium in the Rocky Flats environment was unlikely to become soluble.  These studies did not consider plutonium in water containing fluoride, carbonate, or chlorine.(8). For a critique of the Actinide Migration Evaluation at Rocky Flats, see my “Science Compromised in the Cleanup at Rocky Flats,” on line at http://www.rockyflatsnuclearguardianship.org/leroy-moores-blog/papers-by-leroy-moore-phd-2/

(1)  Johnson, “Some Studies of Low-Level Radiation and Cancer in the United States,” presented at the University of Basel, June 9, 1987; the University of Zurich on June 10, 1987; and the Universities of Bern and Lausanne on June 11, 1987.

(2)  J. M. Cleveland et al., “Plutonium speciation in water from Mono Lke, California,” Science, 1983, vol. 222,  pp. 1323-1325.

(3) Johnson, “Contamination of municipal water supplies in the Denver metropolitan area by the Rocky Flats plant.” Presented at the 146th Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Scnence, in San Francisco, CA, January 4, 1980.

(4)  R. P. Larsen, R. D. Oldham, “Plutonium in drinking water: Effects of chlorination on its maximum permissible concentration,” Science, 1978, vol. 201, pp. 1008-1009.

(5) W. J. Bair, R. C. Thompson, Batelle-Pacific Northwest Laboratories, In Response to Comments: Guidance on Dose Limits for Persons to Transuranium Elements in the Feneral Environment. U. S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Radiation Programs, Criteria and Standards Division, Washington, DC, 20460 (EPA 520/4-78-010)(1978)

(6) M. P. Finkel, W. E. Kisielsk, “Plutonium incorporation through ingestion by young animals,” in The Health Effects of Plutonium and Radium, by W. S. S, Jee (ed.), Salt Lake City: The J. W. Press, University of Utah, 1976.

(7) M. F. Sullivan, A.. L. Crosby, “Absorption of transuranic elements from rat gut,” in Pacific Northwest Laboratory Annual Report for 1975, Part 1, Biomedical Srvices, BWML-2000, Battelle-Pacific Northwest Laboratories, Richland, WA (1976).

(8) Kaiser-Hill Company, Report on Soil Erosion and Surface Water Sediment Transport Modeling for the Actinide Migration Evaluations at the Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site (00-RF-01823) (DOE-00-o3258) August 2000. See also “Approved Modifications to the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement (DOE, EPA, CDPHE, June 9, 2003), Response to Comments, pp. 67-74.

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.

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.