Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  McMillan called the element plutonium after the recently discovered planet Pluto, which had been named by an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who won five pounds for her efforts. She took the name from the Roman god Pluto, god of the underworld, god of the dead, the Destroyer. It seemed an appropriate name for a cold, dark planet made of rock and ice.

  Seaborg suggested the abbreviation Pu as a joke. No one seemed to get the gag, and Pu passed into the periodic table without comment.

  A paper describing the new element was prepared for publication in March 1941, but was abruptly withdrawn after the discovery that plutonium was capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction, and thus might be useful in an atomic bomb.

  In 1939, amid concern that Germany might be in the early stages of developing a nuclear bomb, physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, suggesting that the United States should begin its own research into a bomb. The letter was also signed by Albert Einstein. (Einstein, as well as other prominent physicists, later regretted the letter, as it led to the development and use of the atomic bomb against civilians. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” was later opposed to nuclear weapons.) Niels Bohr, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, was prescient. When asked if enough uranium-235 and -238 could be separated to produce a bomb, he said, “It can never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.” Years later he repeated this to his colleague Edward Teller. “I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” he said. “You have done just that.”

  Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the U.S. government initiated the Plutonium Project at the University of Chicago, with the goal of creating a nuclear chain reaction for plutonium-239 and developing an atomic bomb. In a makeshift lab under Chicago’s Stagg Field in a project euphemistically called the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab), a team of scientists led by Enrico Fermi achieved a sustained nuclear reaction in the world’s first nuclear reactor. When the project was taken over by the army in the summer of 1942, it became the Manhattan Project. The Manhattan Project would bring together some of the greatest physicists in the world to try to build a workable nuclear bomb from scratch in three years.

  General Leslie Grove was chosen to lead the project, and J. Robert Oppenheimer managed the day-to-day operations for the research and design of an atomic bomb. The project moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, near Santa Fe, to a piece of land on a beautiful high mesa that previously had been the site of a ranch school for boys. A hidden city with a deadly secret blossomed in the high desert. There were two other research and production sites associated with the Manhattan Project: the plutonium-production facility at the Hanford site in Washington State and the uranium enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

  Upon the death of President Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency on April 12, 1945, and learned of the secret wartime project. When Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Manhattan Project was just months away from producing a workable nuclear weapon. Two types of atomic bombs were developed. The first, a gun-type fission bomb, was made from uranium-235. This weapon design ultimately proved inefficient, and Los Alamos developed an implosion bomb in which a fissile mass of uranium-235, plutonium-239, or both was surrounded by high explosives that compressed the mass, resulting in nuclear fission. The plutonium triggers eventually produced at Rocky Flats were fission “pits” that when detonated trigger the more powerful fusion explosion of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb.

  No one used the word bomb; they called it a “gadget.”

  The first test of a nuclear bomb was in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Oppenheimer named the test bomb Trinity, reportedly in reference to lines from the poet John Donne: “Batter my heart, three-person’d God” and “As West and East / In all flat Maps—and I am one—are one / So death doth touch the Resurrection.” Twenty miles from the blast, Edward Teller put suntan lotion on his hands and face, even though the early-morning sky was still black. Enrico Fermi stood beside him. For many onlookers, the tremendous explosion evoked powerful, ambivalent feelings: pride and joy at the extraordinary—and swift—scientific achievement, and horror at the deadly weapon that had now been unleashed. The Trinity bomb had a plutonium-239 core.

  Three weeks later, on August 6, 1945, the crew of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber Enola Gay—named after the pilot’s mother—dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. “Little Boy” was a gun-type bomb. Ninety thousand to 160,000 people died within the first four months. “Fat Man,” the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945, three days later, killed 100,000 people within the first two to four months, and tens of thousands more were injured in both blasts. “Fat Man” was a plutonium-core weapon.

  The existence of plutonium was made public only after the bombs were dropped. From 1945 to 1989 the United States produced tens of thousands of nuclear warheads in its arms race with the Soviet Union. Mutual assured destruction—known as MAD—was the governing philosophy. The MAD program was intended to act as a deterrent in that if one country attacked another with nuclear weapons, the attacked country would immediately retaliate and both countries would be destroyed.

  After the Second World War, to formulate safety standards for the nuclear industry, American scientists carried out studies of the effects of plutonium on humans, including tests in which researchers exposed or injected people with plutonium without their informed consent. These studies determined that for humans, even 1 microgram—that is, one-millionth of a gram—should be considered a potentially lethal dose. Experiments with animals demonstrated that within the body, plutonium was distributed differently and more dangerously than radium.

  The term body burden was used to describe the amount of radioactive material present in a human body, which acts as an internal and ongoing source of radiation. The DOE established a permissible “full body burden” for lifetime accumulation of radiation within the body on the assumption that a worker whose exposure did not exceed this level would not suffer ill effects. Although some workers whose body burden was near the limit did not experience any adverse health effects, others exposed at levels far less than the permitted full body burden developed various types of cancers. Exposure to plutonium was linked to cancers, brain tumors, and reproductive disorders, but plutonium was determined to be most dangerous when taken into the lungs. Particles of plutonium weighing 10 micrograms or less can easily be inhaled.

  Robert Stone, head of the Plutonium Project Health Division at the Met Lab in Chicago, made the first estimate of a permissible plutonium body burden. He set the limit at 5 micrograms. In July 1945, scientists at Los Alamos reduced that standard by a factor of five, to 1 microgram. In 1949, in the wake of the disturbing new results from animal testing, representatives from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada at the Tripartite Permissible Dose Conference set an even stricter standard: they agreed that the maximum body burden for plutonium should be 0.1 microgram.

  Officials from the AEC were not pleased. Workers at Los Alamos were already operating with a limit ten times higher than that, and they pointed out that this “extremely conservative” standard would add millions of dollars to the construction of buildings at Los Alamos. They held the level at 0.5 microgram. In 1977 the International Commission on Radiation Protection (ICRP) established a guideline for the maximum occupational plutonium dose for workers of 5 rem annually from both internal and external radiation. In 1991 the ICRP proposed that workplace exposure be lowered from 5 to 2 rem per year, but the United States has not accepted this change. The level of 5 rem per year, set in 1958, is still the U.S. standard.

  Plutonium was supposed to be a savior, to save us from the enemy. It wasn’t supposed to leak and burn and blow away, seep down into the water table and fly up into the sky. It was supposed to pay attention to borders and fenc
es and property lines. It was supposed to know the good guys from the bad guys.

  We don’t worry about it too much, though. The government will let us know if there is any real danger.

  DESPITE JIM Stone’s stern memos, Rockwell decides to go ahead and manufacture pondcrete. Workers call the production of pondcrete the Jelly Factory. But the plutonium pudding, a huge concoction of pond sludge, radioactive substances, hazardous chemicals, and concrete, takes longer than expected to gel. Managers pack the gooey mess into cardboard-and-tarp boxes the size of small refrigerators anyway, resulting in 12,000 one-ton blocks that stand out in the open. Unprotected from sun, wind, and snow, many of the blocks of pondcrete are part liquid, and the boxes are piled on top of one another like huge, soggy, sagging Lego blocks. In less than a year the blocks start falling apart. As they disintegrate, liquid containing nitrates, cadmium, and low-level radioactive waste leaks and leaches into the ground, where it runs downhill toward Walnut Creek and Woman Creek. Workers test the thickness and consistency of the sludge by sticking their thumbs into it. When they report the problem to management, one foreman tells them to “cap” the soft pondcrete blocks with fresh cement over the spot where inspectors usually stick their measuring instruments.

  Then there’s another problem. By the end of 1986, approximately two thousand blocks of pondcrete have been shipped and buried at the Nevada Test Site. Suddenly shipments are halted. Inspectors there have discovered that the pondcrete blocks contain radioactive material as well as hazardous chemicals, which means they are classified as mixed waste. Regulated under the new Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), which governs the disposal of solid and hazardous waste, the Nevada facility doesn’t have a permit for mixed waste.

  Waste regulation at nuclear weapons sites is problematic, even with the passage of RCRA and the Clean Water Act, enacted under a Republican administration. Either DOE bomb plants are exempted from the new laws, or politicians and government officials dodge the issue with vague language and deadlines that are rarely met. DOE managers vigorously resist new environmental laws. At Rocky Flats, it’s common for managers to blindfold EPA investigators before taking them through the plant.

  What no one talks about is the fact that from the moment environmental laws like the RCRA were passed, or when those laws began to apply to DOE facilities, no one—including Rockwell, the EPA, or other defense contractors around the country—has much choice when it comes to allowing the storage of unpermitted mixed hazardous wastes. Facilities like Rocky Flats have to break the law to continue operating. Production cannot stop.

  With much fanfare, that same year the DOE, the Colorado Department of Health, and the EPA sign a joint compliance agreement to address environmental problems at Rocky Flats. But a confidential internal DOE memo acknowledges that the plant is “in poor condition generally in terms of environmental compliance.… Much of the good press we have gotten from the agreement in principle has taken attention away from just how bad the site really is.”

  The DOE may admit internally that the plant is a mess, but they want to keep that information to themselves and put on a good face. Jim Stone continues to write his reports and grows more adamant, despite the fact that Rockwell is becoming increasingly annoyed and tells him to withhold his reports from the DOE. There are layoffs that year. Layoffs are not uncommon given the ever-changing budget, and sometimes people are even hired back or continue to work for Rocky Flats as contractors. Jim Stone isn’t worried. The layoff deadline passes.

  One day he’s in a meeting when there’s a knock on the door. He opens it to a manager and a security guard. “You have one hour to leave,” he’s told.

  He’s stunned.

  “I’m in the middle of a meeting!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” the manager says. “You’re out of here.”

  Under the watch of the armed guard, Stone returns to his office and, as ordered, gathers up as many materials as he can in the time allowed. He stuffs the boxes into his car and turns in his security badge.

  He will never work again in the nuclear weapons industry.

  Eventually, 16,500 one-ton pondcrete blocks will be stacked on the asphalt pad, exposed to the elements, just upwind of Arvada, Broomfield, and the city of Denver.

  I GO back to my classes and my job and my apartment. I don’t tell people what happened. I can’t even say Mark’s name. Sometimes it’s hard to speak at all. Heavy dreams invade my sleep. A clutch in my chest and ringing in my head make me feel as if I were the one who fell from the cliff.

  As a kid I kept secret note pads and spiral-bound journals with curled-up edges. I wrote in the margins of my Big Chief wide-ruled pads. I collected pens, and only the right kind would do: a very fine-tipped black ink that didn’t smear. Things were happening all around me and I had to write them down, fast. In third grade I read Harriet the Spy. Harriet was like me. She snuck around with a secret notebook and took notes on everyone. I stuck ragged little notebooks in the back pockets of my jeans, carried them in my book bag, stashed them under my mattress, and stacked them under my bed. I wrote about everyone: my friends, my enemies, my family, my teachers, my horse, the lake. As I grew older I was always running out of space and wrote on anything that was handy: receipts, napkins, bookmarks, the backs of movie tickets. I couldn’t keep track of it all.

  When Mark dies, I stop writing.

  My year and a half with Mark fills three journals: one thick spiral notebook; a dog-eared leather book with unlined paper; and a tall, narrow-lined book with a beautiful red cloth cover, dotted with coffee stains. I put them in a box under my bed.

  I come home on occasional weekends. My family tries to keep up appearances. My mother has her hair done in an elaborate bouffant helmet at the Arvada Beauty Parlor, just as always. Karma and Karin take turns driving Dad to his office and to his court dates when he loses his driver’s license over another DUI. Bills go unpaid and the house slips into decline. Even my grandfather can’t save the law practice from sinking into a financial abyss. My father grows rail-thin except for his distended abdomen. “I don’t understand it,” my mother says. “He never eats.” He comes home only sporadically and we never really know where he is. Around us, he’s silent and sullen. His white shirt is crumpled and stained, his pants loose and baggy. He rarely changes clothes. My mother wonders if he’s living on the street, or in his car, or with his parents. Does he spend nights on a barroom floor? No one knows what’s true anymore. We’re all waiting, but for what?

  The months stretch on. My mother refuses to file for divorce. “And how,” she asks, “can I support four kids?” She thinks about selling the house, but in the meantime she sells her diamond engagement ring to pay for groceries.

  THE ROCKY Flats Truth Force has been occupying the railroad tracks for a full year, through the summer’s heat and the winter’s snow and cold. When anyone is arrested or removed, another person takes his or her place. The vigil unites groups opposed to Rocky Flats. In the spring of 1979, Patrick Malone—the intrepid pirate of tepee fame—along with other Truth Force members and two chanting Buddhist monks, engage in a 242-mile walk around the area affected by Rocky Flats, going from Boulder to Golden, to the state capital, and back through the cities of Arvada, Broomfield, and Lafayette. They circle the plant three times over a period of three weeks, showing that Rocky Flats is within walking distance of nearly everyone in the Denver metropolitan area.

  They arrive back at the plant just in time for a two-day rally beginning on Saturday, April 28. Police anticipate two to three thousand people. Fifteen thousand show up. The crowd includes people from more than twenty states and a twenty-two-member delegation from Japan. Hundreds of protesters, led by a Buddhist monk, walk the twelve miles from Boulder to Rocky Flats, singing and chanting along the highway. Rockwell security guards, along with nearly fifty police officers from the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, stand on alert. Sister Pam Solo opens the rally by calling for the end of nuclear weapons. “We are dete
rmined to put an end to this technology before it puts an end to us,” she says. “We demand the conversion of Rocky Flats to an industry that is environmentally safe and socially productive.”

  People roar their approval. Kites flutter in the wind and Frisbees sail at the back of the crowd—a sea of blue and green mountain parkas, orange Hare Krishna robes, and yellow rain slickers. T-shirts are emblazoned with “No Nukes” and “Rocky Flats Sparkling Water—Don’t Think, Just Drink.” The highway is lined with parked cars, and nearly seven hundred bicycles stand along the barbed-wire fence. Signs wave above everyone’s heads: “Hell No, We Won’t Glow” and “Better Active Today Than Radioactive Tomorrow.” Albert Einstein gazes placidly from a placard onstage, flanked by two tall speaker towers. A group of Native Americans who’ve walked eleven miles offer a spiritual blessing.

  Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt perform onstage. Speakers include Daniel Ellsberg, Helen Caldicott, and George Wald. One month earlier, in Pennsylvania, there was a serious accident at the Three-Mile Island nuclear reactor involving the partial meltdown of a nuclear core. Now Ellsberg calls Rocky Flats “Denver’s own Three-Mile Island.” George Wald, a retired Harvard biology professor and winner of the Nobel Prize, notes that current stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are the equivalent of sixteen billion tons of TNT. “That’s four tons of TNT for every man, woman, and child on this planet,” he says. “Is there any greater madness than the concept of a limited nuclear war?”

  He’s older than most of the crowd. “I’m here to represent the generation gap,” he says, white hair ruffling in the wind. “I’ve had my life, but it’s highly questionable whether you will have yours, my children.” Dr. Helen Caldicott is even more direct. A doctor serving as president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she calls Rocky Flats a “death factory.” “We’re killing ourselves,” she says, “to make bombs to kill ourselves better.”