“You have a phone call in the church office.”
That’s odd, I think. Who would know to find me here? I follow the woman into a small, carpeted room with a single desk and a telephone. I pick up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Kris?” It’s my mother. Her voice is clipped.
“What’s wrong?”
“Something’s happened.”
Bad news is not unanticipated. “What’s happened?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“You just need to come home.”
“Tell me what happened, Mom.” I sigh and look at my watch. “I’m in class until nine and then—”
“Get in your car and come home right now, honey.”
There’s something different about this time.
“Fine.” I set the receiver back in its cradle, think briefly about going back to the class to explain, and decide to head straight for the parking lot. This is unusual. My family is always in turmoil with one thing or another, but usually the news can wait.
I pull out of the parking lot and turn onto Wadsworth Boulevard. Few cars are on the road. At the first stoplight I debate whether I should run it. Is this an emergency, or just my mother’s dramatic overreaction to something? I pull up to the next light—why am I hitting all the lights?—and I reconsider the tone in her voice. I drive through the red light. By the time I reach our driveway and see every light in the house blazing, I know something is seriously wrong.
The front door is unlocked. I find my mother in the kitchen, alone in the bright light. She sits stiffly at the breakfast counter. Her face is pale.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Kris.” She stands.
“It’s Dad, isn’t it?” I say.
“Honey—”
“Just tell me. Just say it.”
“It’s Mark.”
“What?”
“It’s Mark, honey.” She speaks rapidly, her voice a dead calm. “It happened at Castle Rock.” Mark and I have been to that spot many times; it’s where he taught me how to use a carabiner. “He was climbing with his friend Gary, teaching him how to belay, and something went wrong. Gary was up top and Mark was on belay and he fell.”
I can’t speak. The floor seems to have dropped out from under me.
“Mark fell at Castle Rock?”
My mother nods.
“He’s climbed that a million times.”
“Something went wrong this time. He fell—”
“He’s in Boulder, then? At Boulder Memorial?”
“No—”
“At his mom’s?”
“No, honey.” Her eyes meet mine. “He died. He died at the scene. They sent an ambulance all the way up the canyon, but it was too late.”
The words seem impossible. My body feels like ice.
I hear the front door open and close. It’s my father. My mother must have called him. “I can’t talk now,” I say. I fly up the stairs to Karin’s room, the room we once shared as sisters. I shut the door and turn off the light and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. It feels as if a knife has been shoved in my gut. The air roars around my ears. I hear my father’s voice and then my mother’s. “That’s your daughter,” she yells. “The least you can do is go up to her. Go to her! Go to her!”
I hear my father’s step on the staircase. “No,” I pray. “No, no, no.”
There’s a long pause as I stifle my sobs. He knocks on the bedroom door. “Kris?”
I can’t speak.
“Kris? Are you in there?” He puts his hand on the door handle but doesn’t turn the knob.
“Kris,” he says again, his voice muffled through the door. “Let me in.”
I try to get up. How can I let him in when a thousand times he has cast me out? I pull the dark of the room around me and feel my soles sink into the carpet, a thousand pounds of weight. “No,” I whisper. “No.”
We bury Mark on a cool fall morning. We kneel on the stiff brown grass at the side of the church Mark grew up in, the church his mother still attends, a few miles from Rocky Flats. The ground is cold but not frozen. Mark’s brothers dig a deep, narrow hole with a shovel and we scoop the ashes from the cardboard box and mix them in with the soil, the three of us together: me, Mark’s mother, my mother. Our fingers are numb with cold. We pat down the earth and ash and Mark’s brothers push a small pine tree into the hole, and we build a protective wall around the roots and slender trunk.
My mother offers me some of her little pills. I look away without taking them. She suggests I talk to the minister. I hear nothing from my father.
I think of Mark’s ashes mixed in with the hard soil, rocky and unforgiving. The soil that he believed was contaminated.
The tree that is Mark takes root. I don’t think it will survive the winter, but it does.
BY 1978, news of Dr. Carl Johnson’s research begins to reach the public, and it is sobering. In his published study, he demonstrates a stark pattern of “excess incidence of all cancer in all age categories” for both genders in areas exposed to Rocky Flats contamination, from cancer of the lung, leukemia, and lymphoma to thyroid and brain cancer in females. In the five years after Rocky Flats was built, leukemia deaths in children rose substantially. By 1962, five years after the 1957 explosion, leukemia deaths in children who had lived near the plant were twice the national average. Before the construction of the plant, they’d been below the national average. Birth defects are higher in Arvada between 1975 and 1977. In Area I, which extends thirteen miles downwind from the plant, Johnson finds that males have a 24 percent higher cancer rate, females a 10 percent higher rate. Lung and bronchial cancer for males is about 33 percent higher than in unexposed areas. In Areas I through III, Johnson makes a “most unexpected discovery”: forty cases of testicular cancer, “an unusually high incidence.” Ovarian cancer is also higher than expected, at 24 percent.
When Johnson turns his attention to workers at Rocky Flats in 1980, he finds that they have eight times more brain tumors than expected, as well as triple the number of malignant melanomas. In addition to plutonium, other radioactive and toxic materials keep showing up in the environment: cesium, curium, strontium, and carbon tetrachloride. When scientists go out to collect soil samples in residential areas around Rocky Flats, they wear protective face masks and don’t stay on the property for very long. “So how can children play in it year-round?” Johnson asks.
In January 1980, for the first time the EPA admits to the press that it believes cancer deaths from Rocky Flats contamination may occur among Denver residents. This conclusion is based on reports prepared by the DOE itself and the fact that air-monitoring stations at Rocky Flats have consistently shown higher levels of plutonium-239 than any others in the western hemisphere.
All this grim news is becoming a problem for the county commissioners, the county board of health, the DOE, and Rockwell. For them, business is the name of the game, and no one wants to hear about contamination. It’s a tight group: the county commissioners, who monitor business growth and new home development, appoint the county board of health. The county board of health in turn appoints the health director. Although Rocky Flats is run by Rockwell, it is regulated by the DOE. Rockwell receives bonuses from the DOE based on production. All that counts is the number of triggers produced. There is little transparency or oversight: Rocky Flats makes its own rules. The Atomic Energy Act of 1954 exempts nuclear weapons plants from environmental laws. If there’s going to be any environmental monitoring at all, Rocky Flats and DOE officials want to regulate themselves.
The question is how to keep someone like Johnson from releasing more alarming reports to the press. Dr. Otto Bebber’s attempts to censure Johnson in 1977 and 1979 were unsuccessful. However, on May 1, 1981, the balance of power shifts when the county board of health appoints the president of the Jefferson County Homebuilders Association to the board. Two weeks later, the board votes 3–2 to demand Johnson’s resignation. Otto Bebber call
s Carl Johnson and suggests they have lunch. The men agree to meet at a family-owned restaurant in the area.
Carl Johnson is an unlikely renegade. He’s a quiet, gray-suited man with black-framed glasses that give him a scientific look, a man conservative in his politics. He has an uneasy feeling about this luncheon, though, and he doesn’t have to wait long to see why. The waitress takes their order and Bebber cuts to the chase. He says that the county board of health no longer has confidence in Johnson. He suggests he start looking for another job. He knows Johnson is a family man with three kids. “Why don’t you resign?” Bebber asks. “Then you can keep your benefits and not have any publicity or get adverse marks on your record.”
Johnson is not surprised. He’s been fighting since the day he took office. But he stands by his studies. The lunch ends with little agreement. When the county board of health meets on May 15, the board decides to give Johnson the choice of being fired and losing all his accrued benefits, or of resigning immediately.
Unwillingly, after more than seven years on the job, Johnson resigns.
But some people stand up for him. One county commissioner tells the press that Johnson was dismissed for fueling anger about falling property values and curbing housing development. “The reason they’re getting rid of him is because he was looking at what nobody else wanted to look at,” she says. Dr. Edward Martell, who is feeling the heat for his own soil studies at Rocky Flats, calls Johnson “the only man in the Denver public health community who is concerned about public health.” And a member of the county board, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, notes that most of the county commissioners want “a house on every tenth of an acre in the county” and Johnson is standing in their way.
Within days of his termination, Johnson files suit. When the case goes to trial, an attorney for the county board of health states that the director of the Jefferson County Health Department serves “at the pleasure of the Board.” Another member testifies that Johnson “could be fired for the color of his tie” if the board didn’t like it. The judge rules that because Johnson serves at the pleasure of the board, he cannot be reinstated.
JIM STONE never dreamed he’d get into trouble by simply doing what he was hired to do in the first place. Stone was one of the first engineers employed at Rocky Flats. He was hired in 1952 to work on the original design of the plant, primarily the power and the ventilation systems for two of the plutonium processing buildings. Stone is proud of the ventilation system. Usually buildings are pressurized to exhaust air out of the building. At Rocky Flats, the opposite occurs. Fresh air is brought into the building for workers, pressurized through the equipment and the glove-box line, and then pushed through the filters and back outside again.
For years Stone worked off and on at Rocky Flats. He took other engineering jobs, too, and worked in Alaska, on the missile silos in Idaho and Wyoming, and in Greenland, where he surveyed a pipeline. He loves being an engineer, and he has worked hard to become one. He and his brother and sister were separated at a young age when their parents couldn’t afford to care for them during the Depression, and the children were left in an orphanage in St. Louis. Stone was educated in Catholic schools and eventually attended Washington University. He hopes someday to make enough money to bring his siblings to Colorado, where they can be united after decades apart.
In November 1979, managers at Rocky Flats persuade Stone to come back full-time. They need him, they say, as they intend to “build in-house capability,” relying less on independent contractors. Stone hesitates. The plant is thirty years old, run-down, and largely obsolete, and he’s disillusioned with policies and procedures there. Maintenance has been poor. But if they’re committed to fixing things up, well, he thinks, that might be interesting.
Things don’t go as planned. The plant is not redesigned. But that’s okay. Based on his long years of experience with so many different aspects of the facility, Stone’s role evolves into in-house troubleshooter. His job is to prepare weekly reports that identify key problems and then recommend how they should be fixed. He loves it. He likes the variety of things that come his way, and he likes the idea that he can try to remedy some of the things that have bothered him for years, particularly air and water contamination both on- and off-site.
Stone takes issue with a number of things. There’s far too much radioactive waste stored at the plant, and Rockwell has a hard time figuring out what to do with it all. Drums and containers full of plutonium are piled up, and plutonium-laced liquid from contaminated pond water is sprayed through an irrigation pump onto fields of grass, even in winter, when there is so much ice and snow on the ground that the contaminated water flows into ditches and waterways running off the Rocky Flats site. There is inadequate monitoring of water wells. Plutonium is clogged in the ductwork of buildings, especially Building 771, and the amount of material unaccounted for (MUF—an odd acronym by anyone’s standard) is growing at an alarming rate. The company is burning plutonium-contaminated waste in an incinerator that’s not properly licensed or filtered, and those contaminants are floating up into the Colorado sky.
But the problem that worries Stone most, in the short term, is pondcrete.
Pondcrete is the result of yet another desperate effort to deal with the overflowing radioactive waste at the plant. Since the 1950s, Rocky Flats has been storing liquid hazardous waste in five shallow man-made ponds, similar to small swimming pools. The liquid—low-level radioactive waste and sewage sludge—is poured into the ponds, where it is heated by the sun to evaporate moisture and reduce its overall weight. The DOE wants the ponds phased out. Rocky Flats officials intend to mix the toxic sludge from the ponds with concrete in order to immobilize the hazardous waste, and then pour the toxic pudding into plastic-lined cardboard boxes the size of small refrigerators. They plan to ship the boxes to the Nevada Test Site for burial.
In October 1982, Stone sends a memo to Rockwell’s management. Pondcrete is not going to work, he writes. The cement will not harden and the plutonium will not stabilize. His co-workers, who have warned him in the past that he is going too far, caution against the memo. “Oh, you’re going to get it now!” they tease him. “That last one was a doozie!” But Stone is adamant. His job is to tell Rockwell what they need to know, whether they like it or not.
Morale at Rocky Flats, Stone knows, is low. Some of the managers he works with are discouraged, and the feeling trickles down to the workers. Some managers, Stone hears, were booted from the aerospace industry in California and feel they’ve been transferred to the dirtiest plant in the country. They don’t give a damn, he thinks privately. The policy is to protect your job and keep things quiet because it’s the best money in town. “Someday,” he says to his co-workers, “someone will come in here and find a lot of skeletons in the closet, find out about violations of environmental laws, and just plain dumb engineering things, and wasting money and jeopardizing the workers and the community. And there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Despite the admonitions of his friends, Stone isn’t worried about his job. He’s doing what he was hired to do. He knows where the skeletons are buried, and the company needs to know it, too. He knows he’ll never rise in the ranks at Rocky Flats, but he also knows that his job is absolutely secure.
MY FAMILY never talks about feelings, and we certainly never talk about plutonium. It’s hard to take something seriously if you can’t see it, smell it, touch it, or feel it. Plutonium is a cosmic trick. The invisible enemy, the merry prankster. Can it hurt you or not? None of us know.
Plutonium is the darling and the demon of the nuclear age.
The story of plutonium began with radium, an element discovered in 1899 by Marie Curie. She called an element “radioactive” if its nucleus was unstable and it decayed and released particulate radiation. A radioactive atom gives off radioactivity because the nucleus has too many particles, too much energy, or too much mass to be stable. The nucleus of the atom disintegrates in an attempt to reach a stab
le or nonradioactive state. As the nucleus disintegrates, energy is released in the form of radiation. Different terms are used for measuring radiation, depending upon what is being assessed. The amount of radiation emitted by a radioactive material is measured in curies, named after Marie Curie. The radiation dose absorbed by a person—that is, the amount of energy deposited in body tissue—is measured in rads. A person’s biological risk of health effects due to exposure to radiation is measured in rems or sieverts (the sievert, which equals 100 rem, is the international standard). Radiation workers wear film badges called dosimeters, which measure exposure in rems or sieverts.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, though, radium was not viewed as a health risk. On the contrary, it was hailed as a cure for all kinds of ailments. As early as 1906, radium salts were used to try to shrink or eliminate cancerous tumors. Radium-laced water, facial creams, and baths were also popular. But the excitement about radium was shortlived; it wasn’t long before people began to experience health effects like bone fractures, bone cancer, and jawbone infections.
Perhaps the worst cautionary tale was that of the “Radium Girls.” In the 1920s, about seventy young women worked long days at the U.S. Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey, employed by a defense contractor that supplied glow-in-the-dark watches to the military. Each girl painted 250 watch dials a day with radium paint, earning about a penny and a half per dial. Chemists at the plant wore masks and used lead screens and tongs, but the female workers were told the paint was harmless. They licked the tips of their paintbrushes to sharpen the points, and some girls even painted their fingernails and faces with the glowing substance. The girls suffered from anemia, bone fractures, and necrosis of the jaw, and some died. An ensuing lawsuit, settled in the fall of 1928, created a media sensation and helped establish a new labor law protecting employees from hazards in the workplace.
In response to concern over the dangers of radium, the National Bureau of Standards established an occupational standard for radium, just two months before the discovery of plutonium. Six years later a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan, synthetically produced the solid, silvery-gray element using a five-foot-long cyclotron.
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