Stunned, the women drive down the main road, toward what they suspect is Building 771, where the triggers are made. There is a parking place right next to the fence. They get out of the car, lean their crosses against the chain-link fence, and splash a little blood. Then, hearts beating in fear, they kneel, begin praying, and wait to be arrested.
And wait. It’s cold and still fairly dark, and even though the women are dressed warmly—nuns no longer have to wear habits—they start shivering. Both women are middle-aged. Their knees hurt.
Twenty minutes pass, and finally a group of security guards shows up with trucks and lights. The security manager is furious. The women are handcuffed and put in the back of a security van while the guards ransack their ramshackle car. “Where are your security badges? How did you get in here?” they demand.
“We just drove in,” Mary says.
The guards don’t believe her. “Where are your fake IDs?” they repeat.
“We don’t have any,” Pat responds. “We came in without them.”
“That can’t be true,” a guard says.
“This is a nightmare to them,” Mary says quietly.
One of the guards walks over to the van and recognizes Pat from the early-morning prayer meetings at the west gate. He’s shocked to see her in handcuffs. “What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Well, it’s Ash Wednesday,” Pat says. “This is my act of repentance and prayer.”
“Oh my God,” he says, anger temporarily forgotten. “I forgot to go to Mass!”
Pat laughs. “This can be your mass, okay?” she says.
The nuns are arrested and booked at the Denver County Jail. During their trial, they—like the two nuns before them—insist upon calling Rocky Flats a bomb factory. “We need to tell the truth about it,” Pat says. “It’s only through resistance that Rocky Flats will become visible.”
The nuns spend two months in jail for trespassing. When Pat returns to her job, the other nurses have covered her shifts and held her position for her. She returns to her weekly prayer meetings at Rocky Flats, a commitment she keeps for twelve years. She is saddened when she hears that the security manager, a man she knew and liked, has contracted cancer and died.
NOT ALL protesters are hippies or nuns. On August 9, 1987, Ann White joins her friend Allen Ginsberg as well as Daniel Ellsberg and thousands of others in a protest to commemorate the August 9, 1945, bombing of Nagasaki. The event is a planned civil disobedience: protesters will sit down in the middle of the road so cars can’t enter the plant.
She leaves her home in Cherry Creek, an exclusive Denver neighborhood, at 5:00 a.m. to meet her elderly friend Ruth and drive out to Rocky Flats. It’s still dark. As she says good-bye to her husband, she warns him that she is planning to get arrested. He reminds her of their son’s big engagement party at a fancy restaurant in Denver that evening. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll be back long before then.”
Ann and Ruth drive to the plant, park their car along the highway, and walk up to join the other protesters. They form a large circle of linked hands and stand together as the sun rises and the press arrives. A line of police in riot gear stands ready to act. The protesters begin to move toward the line of police.
Rocky Flats guard Debby Clark stands in that line. She’s been told to hold her ground, and that the protesters will merely approach the line of guards, stop, and sit down before coming close to the plant’s boundary. Debby doesn’t like protesters. Stories circulate about protesters who spit on guards, who rub baby oil on their skin so the guards can’t pick them up. Nothing like that has happened to her, but the stories rankle. She hopes she doesn’t have to use her club.
Ann, on the other hand, has heard stories of activists being kicked and beaten by guards and police officers. She hopes her gray hair and air of propriety buy her a little respect.
Debby watches as the protesters walk calmly toward the line of guards. Then, to her surprise, they walk right through the ranks. Debby looks over at her supervisor. “They’re not supposed to do that!” she mouths. He gestures for Debby and the other guards to run ahead of the protesters and take out their billy clubs. “You can sit down or get knocked down,” the supervisor yells to the protesters, “but you cannot enter the plant site.” Debby moves up, takes her billy club in both hands, and stands firm. It looks like she might have to hit someone after all.
The protesters sit. Some protesters sprawl on the pavement like mock corpses.
Ann and Ruth plunk down on the pavement. An officer approaches them and leans down. “Would you like to be arrested or not?” he asks, almost gently. Ann and Ruth exchange glances. He’s giving them a chance to leave. Ann pauses. “I am here to be arrested,” she says. Ruth nods in agreement. The women help each other up and walk on their own rather than be dragged like some of the other activists. The officer escorts them to waiting school buses, where the women join Ginsberg and Ellsberg and more than three hundred others, all waiting to be taken for booking. This is Ginsberg’s second arrest and Ellsberg’s fourth. Of the throngs of protesters arrested that day, Ann and Ruth are among the oldest.
The protesters are bused to a large chain-link enclosure where they’re held while waiting to be fingerprinted, booked, and ticketed for obstructing a roadway and disobeying a police officer. They’re kept in the enclosure without water or access to a phone until the paperwork is completed, which takes hours. Ann slips her phone number to a fellow protester released ahead of her, and he contacts her husband. When she’s finally allowed to leave, she finds her husband waiting in the parking lot with a dress and shoes stashed in the backseat of the car. They’re late to their son’s party, but she tells her astonished guests that it was worth it. And though she’s convicted of trespassing, her parole officer lets her work off her sentence at the Denver Art Museum.
PLUTONIUM IS a radioactive imp. It flares and burns unpredictably. Like a lethal bee flying from flower to flower, plutonium taints everything it touches. What becomes contaminated with plutonium becomes contaminating itself.
A boxcar full of plutonium is a busy hive.
Like the barge of garbage from New York that roamed up and down the Atlantic Coast seeking a dump site, a boxcar from Rocky Flats is making a grand tour of the western states.
In the single-minded drive to win the Cold War, thousands of tons of radioactive and toxic waste have accumulated around the country. Every site in the DOE complex is contaminated, and there is no central disposal site for nuclear waste. An agreement between the DOE and the state of Colorado stipulates that the amount of radioactive plutonium waste held at Rocky Flats cannot exceed 1,601 cubic yards as of May 1, 1988—roughly the equivalent of a 5,000-square-foot single-story house filled floor to ceiling with plutonium. Rocky Flats has a full house.
For decades, Rocky Flats has been shipping waste to the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory near Idaho Falls, a “temporary” storage facility. In the high desert, millions of cubic feet of plutonium-contaminated waste sit in rusting barrels, drums, and boxes, waiting for the federal government to find a permanent dump site. This dump site is not safe. Sitting nearly six hundred feet above the Snake River Plain aquifer, the site is in an earthquake zone and a floodplain. The aquifer below it supplies water for Idaho farmers. The Idaho site currently holds 3.5 million cubic feet of plutonium-contaminated waste that is not expected to stabilize for ten half-lives, or 240,000 years.
Eighty-five percent of the radioactive waste comes from Rocky Flats, which began shipping waste to Idaho in 1969, following the Mother’s Day fire. In the early years, drums and barrels were dumped off the trucks like normal household trash. Now, twice a month, rail cars leave Rocky Flats filled with fifty-five-gallon steel drums and fiberglass-coated plywood boxes. When they reach the Idaho site, the drums and boxes are stacked on an asphalt pad and then covered with plywood, plastic, and three feet of soil.
Federal officials promised that the Idaho site would be used only until 1970, when the was
te would be moved to a new site. The trouble is, there is no new site. The $700 million facility that was intended to provide permanent storage, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, is plagued with “technical, structural and management deficiencies.” Located twenty-six miles east of Carlsbad and 2,150 feet beneath the desert, WIPP has yet to prove that brine seeping into the waste repositories won’t harm the barrels holding waste, and that potential leaks from aquifers both above and below the site won’t threaten local water supplies.
Idaho governor Cecil Andrus is fed up. In October 1988, he bans any further shipments from Rocky Flats.
Just as the governor issues the ban, a single, steel-lined red boxcar covered with the familiar warning signs of radioactive material crosses into Idaho. Filled with 140 waste drums at fifty-five gallons of radioactive waste per drum, it would put Rocky Flats well over its limit. The boxcar comes to rest temporarily in Blackfoot, a small town that bills itself as the Potato Capital of the World. It sits on a spur of the Union Pacific railroad behind an old granary, guarded by a small team of last-ditch sentries: a detective from the Union Pacific, a safety specialist from the Idaho National Lab, and several Idaho state police officers.
Governor Andrus says Colorado must take the boxcar back. “If you can’t store it, don’t make it,” he says. Colorado won’t take it back. The DOE wants to expand storage for radioactive waste at Rocky Flats, but Colorado’s governor, Roy Romer, who took office in 1987, refuses. And he stands his ground. A spokesman tells the press, “Governor Romer doesn’t want [the boxcar] back and doesn’t want any long-term storage at Rocky Flats.” Romer chastises officials from the DOE. “If you can’t dispose of the waste,” he says, “you can’t produce the material. If the limit is reached, Rocky Flats should not operate.” He threatens to close Rocky Flats if a solution can’t be found.
Andrus is equally adamant, despite the threat of legal action. His state has been dumped on for decades. “The legal grounds are not near as important as the moral and political grounds,” he says. “And I can use the courts till you can step on my beard.” The Reagan administration begins looking for alternatives, including potential sites at military bases and in New Mexico, Colorado, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, South Carolina, and Tennessee. “No sale,” says Washington governor Booth Gardner. All of the governors say no. The administration suggests a site in Pueblo, a city of 102,000 south of Denver. Citizen opposition is swift. “We’re totally against putting that stuff here,” says Pueblo’s city manager. “They cannot expect our city to take their problems. Nobody here wants it.” Governor Romer proposes a short-term solution of moving boxcars of plutonium waste to Piñon Canyon just east of Trinidad, a town of nine thousand residents two hundred miles south of Denver. Piñon Canyon is owned by the Army and often used as a training ground by Fort Carson. The idea is squashed.
The red boxcar filled with radioactive material sits for days in Blackfoot, Idaho, until, in a deadly game of high-level atomic NIMBY (“not in my backyard”), Governor Andrus sends the boxcar back to Colorado. For weeks it sits on a railroad sidetrack—along with six other armored boxcars awaiting a destination—on the Rocky Flats site while officials try to figure out what to do with this “orphan waste.” Governor Romer asks the DOE not to unload the car. Finally, in December 1988, top DOE officials meet with Romer and the governors of New Mexico and Idaho. They come to a tentative agreement. They will pressure Congress to open WIPP more quickly, and the DOE will provide financial assistance to Colorado, New Mexico, and Idaho while they search for a temporary, interim storage site. Romer is reluctantly persuaded that it is important to keep Rocky Flats open as a production facility. The closed boxcar sits at Rocky Flats for months before finally being moved to WIPP.
THE INCINERATOR at our little old house in Arvada is long gone and turned into a garden planter by the new owners. We don’t have an incinerator at the house in Bridledale; the burning of household trash is now banned and a noisy truck rattles down our street once a week to pick up the bags of trash we lug to the end of the driveway.
Rocky Flats follows different rules. A $2 million, three-thousand-square-foot “trash compactor,” or fluidized bed incinerator, was completed in July 1979 and housed in Building 776, the same building in which the 1969 Mother’s Day fire occurred. Designed and built by Rocky Flats workers to burn plutonium-contaminated waste, the “plutonium recovery” incinerator is the only one of its kind in the United States and perhaps in the world. Intended to operate around the clock, the incinerator makes its first continuous 108-hour run in 1979. But no one outside the plant learns of the active incinerator until 1986—seven years after it began operating. Even then, no one knows exactly what the incinerator burns or if it adequately filters waste. Dr. Edward Martell and a group of scientists submit a paper to the government, the health department, and the EPA opposing the incinerator, as the incinerator releases plutonium and other contaminants into the air and creates a health and environmental hazard. Rocky Flats and DOE officials deny any danger and continue to operate the incinerator. Following a meeting of several hundred local residents at a high school gymnasium, Gene Towne, a spokesman for Rockwell at Rocky Flats, says “the majority of the material was office paper and paint thinner,” although Rockwell’s director of plutonium operations later admits to the press that the incinerator had been used to burn eighteen tons of radioactive material.
The problem with Rocky Flats is not just a smoking chimney or a hole in the dike. The weapons plant is like a bag filled with ultrafine sand—a bag filled with millions of glittering, radioactive specks too tiny to see—and the bag has been pricked with pins.
WHO WILL bless this seemingly blighted land?
Charles Church McKay, whose family homesteaded on Rocky Flats land, has been waiting a long time to get things settled with the government. Nine years have passed since litigation began in the case in which McKay and two other landowners sought $23 million in damages from the DOE and its codefendants, claiming their contaminated land not only had diminished market value but was unfit for human habitation. According to the DOE, McKay’s land surrounding Rocky Flats is safe, but the state of Colorado and Jefferson County refuse to issue building permits or allow any commercial or residential development.
When the case finally goes to trial, officials from the Colorado Department of Health, Rockwell, and the EPA testify. Ousted county health director Carl Johnson presents his studies, stating that radioactive emissions from Rocky Flats have caused an excess of cancer and there should be no new housing within ten miles of the plant because of ongoing contamination.
DOE officials disagree. Stanley Ferguson, epidemiologist at the Colorado State Health Department, testifies against Johnson. He says there is no proven connection between the activities of Rocky Flats and an increase in cancer, and no reason to consider closing or moving the plant. He concedes that the health department’s stance “has been and always will be that Rocky Flats was built on the wrong place and still is on the wrong place,” but he asks, “What is the case for moving it at considerable expense to the taxpayers?”
U.S. district judge Richard P. Matsch admits that land near Rocky Flats is contaminated in varying degrees by radioactive plutonium and americium. Nonetheless he believes that areas near the plant “are suitable” for future development and use, and that Johnson’s standard for plutonium in surface dust is unnecessarily conservative. The judge agrees with Ferguson that “no measurable increases in cancer incidence resulting from operations at Rocky Flats have been demonstrated by any appropriate scientific method” and “there should be no human health effects different from those resulting from background radiation.”
Ultimately the suit is settled out of court for about $9 million in favor of McKay and the other landowners for about two thousand acres of contaminated land. Other details of the settlement are not released. Under the terms of the settlement, all confidential documents received during discovery are returned to the DOE. Th
is effectively seals off information about contamination from use by journalists, scientists, or concerned citizens. Hundreds of contested acres will remain “open space and recreation,” where residents can hike or bike. In other areas, residential development will continue as long as homebuilders take remedial measures such as plowing contaminated soil below the surface level before laying the foundation for a house—an act that in itself can redistribute plutonium into the air and does not take into consideration movement of soil by weather, burrowing animals, or other forces and conditions.
Under the settlement agreement, the state of Colorado agrees to provide the McKay family with a certificate attesting that levels of plutonium and americium in their land are at or below the state standard of two disintegrations per minute per gram of dry soil. Charles McKay, the nephew of Marcus Church, is pleased with the result. The settlement allows development to continue on land with levels of contamination five times higher than what Johnson and others consider safe, and it also eliminates further controversy for the DOE by sealing the records. “The purpose for the lawsuit was to get our land back,” McKay says. “Our basic intention was to have the federal judge bless the land.”
Even without the pulpit of his job, Carl Johnson doesn’t let up. “Radiation is sneaky,” he says to the press. Cancer and leukemia can take years to show up. In fact, he reminds the press, in 1984 the DOE prepared a point-by-point response that confirmed most of the data in the Howard Holme and Stephen Chinn report, demonstrating a likely connection between contamination and illness. Further, Johnson notes, the court system is flawed. “The burden of proof is on the victim, not the defendants. I think the nuclear industry has traded on that fact. Officials have permitted excessive plutonium exposures knowing that they will be through with their careers and retired before the evidence is apparent.”
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