Rocky Flats: a Toxic Mess

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The Denver Post
June 25, 2000 Sunday 2D EDITION
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A-01
HEADLINE: PRICE OF PEACE The Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant helped
America win the Cold War, but its toughest fight began when
production of plutonium triggers stopped and the cleanup of the
highly contaminated facility started.
BYLINE: By Mark Obmascik, Denver Post Staff Writer,

No human had worked here for 40 years, but Ricky Mote felt ready. He
layered on four sets of safety boots and three pairs of gloves and
squeezed the rest of his body into two airtight moon suits. Just in
case, an ambulance waited.

Mote expected some danger while digging up 171 drums of uranium from
a trench at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

What he didn't expect, though, was exploding green goo.

In one of the first jobs of the $7.7 billion Rocky Flats cleanup -
the most massive public-works project in the history of Colorado and
the first of its kind on Earth - Mote motioned a co-worker in a
backhoe, Jeff Herring, to scoop out an unmarked barrel.

The black drum was rotted, and some lime-green sludge, loaded with
uranium, oozed out. Mote edged closer for a look.

Suddenly: Fire!

Mote leapt backward from the blue flash and waved for help. Joe
Fanning, another worker in a moon suit, jumped ahead with his brass
shovel.

One dump of sand and the uranium fire was out. But the crew was shaken.

'I just about pooped myself,' Mote said of the August 1998 flash fire.

At Rocky Flats, it was one drum down, 1,099,956 to go.

In the next six years, the U.S. government plans to turn Rocky Flats,
one of the world's most fearsome and filthy nuclear bomb factories,
into 6,000 acres of hiking and biking trails and light industry 16
miles northwest of downtown Denver.

With little public attention, the top-secret complex has trucked out
an estimated 600 plutonium pits, key weapon parts that each carry the
killing power of a Hiroshima bomb, down Interstate 25 in Denver to
another government facility in Texas.

A former plutonium lab has been reduced to a concrete slab, and 4,060
gallons of volatile plutonium solutions have been drained from
leaking pipes and tanks. Another 30 tons of depleted uranium has been
unearthed from outdoor trenches by $20-an-hour workers such as Mote,
Fanning and Herring.

All that was the easy part.

Now the U.S. government is pushing ahead to do something at Rocky
Flats that has never been done anywhere: detoxify a nuclear bomb
plant.

Among the challenges:

Finding 1,100 pounds of plutonium that somehow became lost in
ductwork, drums and industrial gloveboxes. The amount of missing
plutonium at Rocky Flats is enough to build 150 Nagasaki-strength
bombs.

Cleaning 13 'infinity rooms' - places so radioactive that instruments
go off the scale when measurements are attempted. One infinity room
is so bad that managers welded its door shut in 1972. Another room
was stuffed with plutonium-fouled machinery and then entombed in
concrete.

Trucking out dangerous materials. In the next two years, an estimated
16,000 pounds of high-grade plutonium must be moved through metro
Denver to South Carolina. On top of that, to meet the planned 2006
cleanup completion date, Rocky Flats must ship out more than three
truckloads of radioactive waste each day; the plant now moves only
two truckloads a week.

Controlling costs. Cleanup delays at Rocky Flats would cost taxpayers
$2 million a day. The project already is two years behind schedule,
though cleanup managers express confidence they'll soon catch up. The
government expects to spend nearly twice as much to raze Rocky Flats
as it spent to build Denver International Airport.

Protecting workers and neighbors. Cleanup workers are opening
contaminated drums and pipes that haven't been handled for four
decades. The result: Employee radiation doses have been climbing. The
main cleanup contractor was fined $41,250 last month after a
demolition worker suffered a heavy radiation dose from a finger cut
while taking apart a plutonium furnace.

The cleanup carries import far outside Colorado. With dozens of old
Cold War weapons factories awaiting decontamination in the United
States, the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France, Rocky
Flats is a key test case for the world's nuclear cleanup industry.

'Rocky Flats is the flagship site in demonstrating tangible and
significant progress toward safe closure of former nuclear weapons
production sites,' said U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose
department is managing the cleanup. 'The safe closure of Rocky Flats
by 2006 is a top priority.'

Much information about Rocky Flats still is classified by the
government as top secret. To tell how the 700-building complex became
so contaminated - and how it will be decontaminated - The Denver Post
interviewed dozens of workers, reviewed thousands of pages of records
and toured bomb-making buildings that remain protected by
anti-aircraft guns, foot-thick vaults and guards with submachine guns.

'Most dangerous building' just part of the task
Put simply, Rocky Flats is a mess.

One highly polluted bomb building, the size of three football fields,
was described in 1994 as the most dangerous building in America.
Another was so heavily contaminated by a plutonium fire that
engineers finally quit trying to clean it and instead built a false
ceiling to entrap the splattered radioactivity above workers' heads.
At an outdoor pad that once stored 5,200 drums of radioactive waste,
an underground plume of plutonium, oil and carcinogenic industrial
solvents is seeping downhill.

Nobody envisioned such major pollution problems on March 23, 1951,
when the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the nation was
building a top-secret nuclear weapons plant in a rocky but flat
ranching area of Jefferson County. The Denver Post heralded the
government decision with a front-page headline: 'There's good news
today.' The story ran next to a Korean War photo with the headline:
'20,000 Reds Flee Yank Paratroopers.'

By the time the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik
into space in 1957, Rocky Flats had become the linchpin in the
nation's nuclear bomb system.

Rocky Flats took plutonium, made by other government plants or
recycled from old warheads in the field, and turned it into one of
the most highly engineered devices ever made by man - plutonium pits,
or triggers, for nuclear bombs.

A hollow sphere that varies in size from a grapefruit to a soccer
ball, a plutonium pit explodes with the power of a Hiroshima bomb.
During World War II, that was enough to kill 140,000 people.

But in today's nuclear arsenal, the pit serves mainly as a starter
that ignites the final firepower of a thermonuclear weapon; a pit is
the compact A-bomb that detonates the overall H-bomb. In modern
warheads, Rocky Flats pits set off weapons 600 times stronger than
the Hiroshima bomb, which itself was the explosive equivalent of
15,000 tons of TNT.

According to declassified reports, the government made about 70,000
pits while Rocky Flats operated from 1953 to 1989. That's equal to
five pits a day.

Elaborate security system costs $55 million a year

It's hard to walk through the inner reaches of Rocky Flats today
without feeling at least a little unnerved. In the coldest days of
the Cold War, up to 8,000 workers entered here 24 hours a day, seven
days a week, to build the most deadly devices ever invented.

Visitors must pass through as many as four security stops before
entering any classified section of the bomb complex. Rocky Flats
spends $55 million a year on security, an amount that exceeds the
annual budget for every police and sheriff's department in Colorado
except Denver.

At the first Rocky Flats checkpoint, to protect against terrorist
suicide missions, guards with submachine guns swab dust from the
steering wheels and doors of visiting cars to check for explosives
residue.

The second checkpoint is staffed by more armed guards, who screen
visitors with metal detectors and scan fingers and palms with a
computer that matches handprints with government records. Most people
who proceed through this guard station already have received a
top-secret 'Q' clearance, which requires a full investigation of at
least the past 10 years of their personal lives.

A third checkpoint just outside a plutonium building screens the
visitor's necklace of five or so security badges to make sure the
person is allowed inside. Some buildings also post a fourth security
station, where more guards with submachine guns check visitor badges
behind a portal of bulletproof glass and 4-inch-thick metal doors.

The perimeter of the 385-acre pit production area is surrounded by
two razor-wire fences, security cameras and prison-like watchtowers
with more armed guards. To foil helicopter landings, anti-aircraft
guns are stationed on the roofs of several buildings.

If all the outdoor security feels spooky, it's just a prelude for
what lies inside the plutonium buildings. And one place looms largest
in Rocky Flats lore - Building 771.

'It's known as the Hole. It's the worst damn building in the whole
complex,' said Tony DeMaiori, who has worked at the complex for 20
years.

A windowless two-story concrete structure dug into a hillside in
1951, Building 771 was the world's first factory-sized plutonium
processing plant. Almost every nuclear weapon ever made by the United
States started here.

It was not clean work.

Building 771 took scraps of plutonium, or tainted plutonium from old
warheads, and recycled it into gray buttons, or ingots, roughly the
size of a hockey puck. Purifying the plutonium required vast amounts
of nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride and caustics.

Almost all work was done inside the building's 217 gloveboxes,
aquarium-like containers that ranged in size from one minivan to
three Winnebagos. Each glovebox was outfitted with several pairs of
elbow-length gloves, made of rubber and lead, which protected
workers' hands from radiation while handling plutonium.

With 147,900 square feet of cauldrons, precipitators, furnaces and a
giant incinerator, Building 771 helped win the Cold War by turning
hundreds of retired old pits into powerful new ones.

But the same chemicals that liquefied and purified plutonium also ate
through overhead plumbing.

The result: Leak after leak after leak.

'Occasionally you'd feel a drip on your head and you'd be
contaminated with plutonium nitrate,' DeMaiori said.

In the vocabulary of Rocky Flats, contamination was 'crap.' Workers
sprayed with radioactivity were 'crapped up.' Workers sprayed with so
much radioactivity that they exceeded the government's annual dose
limits - and were forced out of plutonium areas and into desk-job
assignments - were 'crapped out.'

Jim Kelly, who worked 23 years in Building 771, said his worst moment
came when co-workers heaving a drum of plutonium waste into the
incinerator accidentally dropped it down his back.

'They dumped a barrel of crap on me. Oh, it was a hellhole to work
in,' he said.

'771 was a building that was feared, and the reason was leaks - leaks
from the pipes, leaks from the valves, leaks from the boxes. There
were incidents there every day, every week, every year that I worked
there.

'There was always tape or plastic on something to stop the leaks. It
looked like a building that had 5 million Band-Aids slapped on it.'

Still, workers kept coming back to the Hole. One reason was the
terrific camaraderie forged by terrible working conditions. Another
reason was 'hot pay.'

When Kelly started work in 1956, hot pay was an extra dime an hour on
top of the $2 standard wage. Today the top rank-and-file
decontamination workers make $20 an hour, or $30 per hour for time in
a moon suit with an oxygen tank.

With hot pay comes risk. Al Williams remembers working with his arms
deep in a glovebox when he felt some warmth on his leg.

It was leaking plutonium solution.

'There was a hole in the box,' Williams said. 'Things were different
in the old days.'

John Goodnow doesn't even know when he was contaminated. After
finishing a routine inspection of a plutonium tank-draining area, he
got ready to leave for the locker room.

Then a co-worker with a radiation meter found something on Goodnow's
safety bootie.

'You can't see it or feel it or taste it or smell it, but it was
there,' Goodnow said. 'I must have just walked across something.'

His dose was small and is not expected to pose any health problems.
But another Building 771 employee, Don Gable, died of brain cancer at
age 31, in 1980, after working part of every day with his head 6
inches from a plutonium nitrate pipe. The government lost the dead
man's brain before an autopsy could check for radiation.

One storage tank area was so plagued with leaks that workers called
it the 'snake pit' and dreaded the shifts when they were assigned to
clean it.

And then there was Room 141, which contained a pump that squirted so
often that low areas in the floor sometimes flooded with 2 inches of
plutonium nitrate. Cleanup crews managed to drain the room but then
stopped work after failing to reduce radioactivity below the level
that reads 'infinity' on standard plant instruments.

The door finally was welded shut in 1972, creating a radioactive time
capsule that has gone unvisited by any person since the days of
Watergate and Archie Bunker's 'All in the Family.' Room 141 was
abandoned so quickly that a peek through the window today shows a
jackhammer still stuck in the floor.

That was an accidental spill. Sometimes workers spilled plutonium on
purpose to prevent even bigger trouble.

During complex chemical operations, so much plutonium nitrate dripped
onto the bottom of gloveboxes that workers faced the risk of
criticality - an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that sprayed a
deadly stream of neutrons.

To prevent criticality, workers did the nuclear equivalent of pulling
the plug on a bathtub. They used a 'crit valve' to dump plutonium
nitrate from the glovebox to the factory floor. That prevented a
criticality disaster from ever occurring at Rocky Flats.

'When you got more than 2 inches of liquid in a box, you'd have a
choice - you either have a criticality, or you have a cleanup job,'
said Don Sabac, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961. 'You always chose
the cleanup job.'

For a worker, that meant dropping to his or her hands and knees and
scrubbing the plutonium solution off the floor with industrial
cleanser, called K.W., and strengthened paper towels called Kimwipes.

That didn't always work. Acids in plutonium solutions often ate
through concrete floors or walls and prevented a thorough cleanup. So
workers painted over dozens of radioactive areas with purple or brown
epoxy.

Paint could seal off nuclear spills, but it took more than that to
clean up after fires.

Plutonium shavings can catch on fire just by being piled in the wrong
shape or being exposed to the wrong chemical. At Rocky Flats, the
wrong thing happened a lot.

From 1953 to 1990, workers reported 430 fires at Building 771 alone.

The biggest started Sept. 11, 1957, when shavings spontaneously
ignited in a glovebox network containing 93 pounds of plutonium. The
10:10 p.m. fire had consumed the protective Plexiglas and gloves, the
official 'incident' report said, when Ted Eckert arrived.

'The fire's out! Stop the water!' workers shouted to Eckert from
inside Room 180.

Eckert ran down the hall to tell others to turn off the water. Then -
boom! - the building rocked.

The explosion nearly knocked Eckert off his feet and two other
firefighters, Bob Vandegrift and V.F. Eminger, through a closed metal
door.

'It's blown up! Get out!' shouted Bruce Owen from inside the room.

'We'd better get out of here,' Eckert told Floid Parker as they ran
for their lives.

Workers fled outside and looked up the building's 150-foot
smokestack. A dense black smoke plume, filled with sparks, rose 100
feet above Jefferson County.

It took 13 hours to put out the fire, which spackled undisclosed
amounts of plutonium throughout the inside of the building.

Though most contamination was removed during an eight-month
scrubdown, some simply was painted over and is awaiting cleanup today.

And that wasn't even the plant's most destructive blaze.

On Mother's Day 1969, a plutonium briquette spontaneously ignited in
a neighboring Rocky Flats facility, Building 776, and spread what at
that time was the worst industrial fire in U.S. history.

'The fire was out of the top of the (foundry) with flames about 18
inches high. One of the two firemen heard two loud reports (like
rifle shots) and saw two fireballs (about basketball size) go to the
ceiling,' said the government report on the fire. 'The firefighters
reported seeing burning plutonium erupt with showers of sparks when
hit with water.'

The fire, which caused $200 million in damage in today's dollars, was
extinguished after four hours. So much water was used to douse the
Building 776 blaze that it flowed downhill through a fortified
267-foot tunnel to Building 771, where some rooms were soaked in a
radioactive flood.

Workers such as Jim DeAndrea, a 41-year Rocky Flats veteran, spent
the next two years trying to scrub away the radioactivity.

'I put on my three pairs of coveralls and full face mask and hood and
went crawling through the ducts on my back with a sponge, just wiping
it down the best I could,' DeAndrea said. "I was working in
infinity,' he said, referring to the reading on the radiation meters
along the 3-foot-by-4-foot metal shafts.

Inside the ducts, DeAndrea felt his finger pinched on a ragged edge
of sheet metal. That simple snag was enough to contaminate him.

Safety officials tried to wash off DeAndrea's radiation with cold
water, but that didn't work. Neither did rubbing him raw with a
coarse brush or scrubbing him in Clorox bleach.

So plant medical workers pulled out a scalpel and scraped off layer
after layer of skin on DeAndrea's hand until the radiation meters
finally said it was safe.

Like many Rocky Flats workers, DeAndrea emerged from the painful
decontamination ready to get right back on the job.

'We were fighting the Cold War. I'm proud that we worked hard and did
it well and nobody got killed,' DeAndrea said.

The fire in one Rocky Flats building temporarily blocked an entire
superpower's bomb-making operations. Fearful that the American delay
might let the Soviets pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, Rocky
Flats managers pushed hard to resume weapons production.

Cleanup from the 1969 fire never was completed.

'When the gloveboxes were breached by the fire, contamination spread
everywhere - in the floor and overhead,' said David DelVecchio, who
worked in Building 776 for 31/2 years. 'A false ceiling was installed
because they couldn't get all the contamination out of the original
ceiling.'

Some equipment in Building 776 was so radioactive that workers hauled
it into Room 127, stacked it into an 8-by-10-foot block and sealed it
all in 18 inches of concrete.

In six more years, that concrete tomb - and everything else at Rocky
Flats - is supposed to be gone.

It won't be easy.

Lost plutonium

must be recovered

From March 1997 to June 1999, thousands of pounds of plutonium pits
were trucked from Rocky Flats to the federal Pantex facility near
Amarillo, Texas. The exact number of pits remains classified, but
Energy Department officials confirmed that all were moved out.
Nuclear weapons expert Tom Cochran, consulting with declassified
government databases and other information assembled by the Natural
Resources Defense Council, estimated the plant trucked 600 pits to
Texas.

While the weapon parts are gone, many plutonium slivers, dust specks
and drips remain.

According to the government's last declassified report, from 1994,
ducts, pipes and gloveboxes are believed to be loaded with 440 to 660
pounds of lost plutonium. Another 440 to 660 pounds is believed lost
in drums and other storage containers.

For protection, every person who today walks through the double doors
of the Building 771 anti-contamination airlock must wear two layers
of coveralls, three pairs of safety boots and booties, two sets of
gloves - and a dosimeter badge that measures a visitor's radioactive
exposure.

On the floor is a yellow line. One side is clean, the other
contaminated. All protective clothes worn over the yellow line, into
the hot zone, become nuclear waste that must be sent to a special
government laundry in eastern Washington for decontamination or
disposal.

'At some point, when you're inside there, you're going to be tempted
to scratch your face or adjust your safety glasses. Don't do it,'
radiation control worker Joe Springer tells a visitor. 'Don't touch
anything.'

The warning doesn't have to be given twice. The gravity of the
cleanup hits home every time visitors see teams of Rocky Flats
workers, in yellow coveralls or white Tyvek moon suits, walking
through the concrete hallways to their next demolition job.

Rooms here are lit dimly, and floors are painted battleship gray.
Speakers constantly play KOSI-FM light-rock music. Though many bomb
factory workers can't stand the station's typical fare of Celine
Dion, Whitney Houston and the Backstreet Boys, they listen anyway
because the noise means the public address system, which also blares
alarms in case of radioactive accidents, is working.

Nine feet up a wall is a pizza-sized patch of purple paint, which
seals a radioactive spray from some long-ago accident. Nearby, an
entire glovebox became so hot from repeated leaks that the whole
thing was painted brown.

Dozens of leaky valves and gaskets are wrapped in tape and
shrink-wrapped clear plastic.

Up a 10-foot scaffold, workers in coveralls and respirators gingerly
move along one of the most dangerous jobs at the plant - taking apart
and draining more than 30 miles of plutonium pipes.

Like most nuclear bomb factories where security was a top concern,
Rocky Flats has no accurate blueprints for many plutonium buildings.

In Building 771, where pipes carrying plutonium nitrate and other
liquids are stacked overhead in up to 10 layers of confusing mazes,
workers struggle to figure out where individual lines start and end.

There's no room for error. Draining too much plutonium nitrate at
once can result in an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.

'If we get 4 liters of this liquid, we're in the power business,'
said Kelly Trice, manager of the Building 771 cleanup. 'Even a half
an aspirin of plutonium is a major contamination problem. It would
peg out the meters.'

While some crews drain pipes, others use jackhammers to peel away the
inside of Building 771 like an onion, removing a half-inch of
concrete wall and floor at a time until all radioactivity is gone.

It's slow, grueling work. To remove a single 6-foot concrete floor
berm, which prevented spilled plutonium nitrate from flowing between
rooms, Marcus Gonzales and six other workers needed a full day of
pounding and scraping.

They call themselves the 'Berminators.'

Other workers put on moon suits to cut apart 217 contaminated
gloveboxes. Though the typical Building 771 glovebox contains about a
pound of lost plutonium dust, or holdup, some individual boxes are
tainted with more than 5 pounds, or nearly enough to make a pit.

To take down a steel-and-glass glovebox, workers in moon suits build
a clear plastic tent, called a bird cage, around it. Then they cut it
apart with low-tech equipment such as band saws and Sawzalls.

Mistakes can be costly.

On Feb. 2, 1999, a worker was cutting apart a plutonium furnace with
a band saw inside a glovebox. After finishing one cut through steel,
the man, who is not being named to protect his privacy, started
moving the saw for his next cut when his finger accidentally hit the
'on' switch.

The blade slashed his left index finger to the bone.

Safety workers rushed to help.

To prevent the wound from contaminating other workers, the man's hand
was stuffed inside a plastic bag and sealed with tape.

An ambulance raced him to the Rocky Flats medical facility, where the
wound was washed and tested and washed again. A physician gave him a
shot of diethylenetriaminepentaacetate, or DTPA, an experimental drug
that flushes heavy metals from the body.

For three days, the government collected all the man's urine and
feces to see how much plutonium remained inside his body. Other tests
continued for a year.

Rocky Flats officials said the man ended up receiving an initial
radioactive dose 35 times higher than the annual limit for visitors
to Rocky Flats, and 10 times more than the typical Denver resident
receives in a year from natural radiation that comes from living at a
high altitude.

The single finger cut loaded the worker with a long-term radioactive
dose to his internal organs that exceeded the government's
occupational safety limits by 30 percent. 'He has not suffered any
health effects, nor do we expect him to,' said Mark Spears, the
plant's chief radiation safety official.

The government fined Kaiser-Hill, the worker's employer and the main
cleanup contractor at Rocky Flats, $41,250 for the accident.

'Kaiser-Hill managers failed to recognize that there had been a
change in the work scope of the planned decontamination and
decommissioning activities, and, as a result, did not re-evaluate the
hazards and apply appropriate controls,' the Energy Department said.

After the accident, the company shut down the cleanup job and checked
its safety procedures again.

The demolition project was completed 10 months later.

When Building 779, the plant's former laboratory, was reduced to a
slab of concrete in January, it was the first time anyone had
successfully demolished a plutonium bomb building.

Rocky Flats officials said the job was completed nine months ahead of
schedule. But the demolition work cost $1,088 per square foot, or $74
million.

That was more than double the original cost estimate.

And that was for the plant's least-polluted plutonium building.

The overall Rocky Flats cleanup is running two years behind schedule,
Energy Department officials said, though both government officials
and Kaiser-Hill executives said they believe the company still can
catch up to meet the 2006 cleanup completion date.

Kaiser-Hill has a huge financial incentive to meet that deadline. If
the company completes the job by Dec. 15, 2006, and meets the overall
budget, the government will pay it a $355 million bonus.

But if the cleanup stretches beyond April 1, 2007, the company is
docked $54,794 a day.

The company gets to keep 30 cents of every dollar it saves, but must
pay 30 cents of every dollar of total cost overruns.

'The money is significant, but the real incentive is the reputation
Kaiser-Hill can make for itself,' said Paul Golan, the Energy
Department's No. 2 manager at Rocky Flats. 'This is the first nuclear
site to be brought to the ground. There are a lot of other nuclear
sites around the world. If Kaiser-Hill can do it here and do it well,
they become the Microsoft of the business.'

In a major change at Rocky Flats, rank-and-file workers earn
incentive bonuses of up to 50 cents an hour if they meet performance
standards on cleanup project safety and schedule.

'People are working themselves out of a job, but there's a tremendous
amount of pride. You go into the buildings today and you see people
kicking a--,' said Kaiser-Hill manager Bob Card.

Rocky Flats needs all the hustle it can get. When the uranium
excavation crew of Mote, Fanning and Herring, among others, prepared
to clean up Trench T-1, they expected to find 150 drums buried
several feet below the prairie.

They ended up finding 171 drums as shallow as 8 inches underground.

One drum smoked and two others flared in blue fire when the
excavation exposed them to air for the first time in four decades.

The whole job was completed 30 days ahead of schedule, in August
1998, at an on-budget cost of $12 million, or $70,175 per drum.

Now the workers are anxious for more.

'The stuff we're digging up was never supposed to be seen again. But
we had the training, we did the preparation, we got it done,' Mote
said. 'You never have a chance to become complacent. You don't have
to exaggerate about this job.'

GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Courtesy of Rocky Flats and The Denver Post/Brian
Brainerd and The Denver Post file photos The Building 771 complex,
the world's first factory-size plutonium processing plant, is the
most notorious at Rocky Flats. A plutonium button The 'Berminators'
pause, above, while removing contaminated raised doorsills from
Building 771. The decommissioning of the facility is a blue-collar
job. Top, security remains tight at the former nuclear weapons plant.
Kelly Trice, project manager at Building 771, looks at the remains of
Building 779, which has been decontaminated and demolished except for
the foundation slabs. Rocky Flats is the first nuclear weapons plant
to be detoxified. Officials hope to be done with the cleanup by Dec.
15, 2006. The 6,000-acre plant will be transformed into hiking and
biking trails, with some light industry. Cleanup crew members, left,
work on some of the 171 rotting drums of uranium recovered from a
trench. Don Sabac, above, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961, has seen
both sides of the plant: Cold War producer of plutonium triggers and
pioneer of nuclear cleanup. Development was far from Rocky Flats when
the plant was built. Above, Colorado 72, between Arvada and Colorado
93, in April 1953. The gleaming barrels in this 1973 photo make up an
orderly storage room. Today, rotting, contaminated drums are a major
hazard. Above, workers in 1967 check in at Rocky Flats. Employees
were required to have a separate security badge for each area of the
sites they entered. Left, The Denver Post announces the selection of
Colorado for the nation's newest top-secret nuclear weapons plant in
1951. Calvin Richard, left, and Dave DiMiana work on cleaning up
contaminated soil at Rocky Flats in this June 1976 photo. The May 11,
1969, fire at Rocky Flats was devastating, destroying equipment and
spreading contamination far and wide. Cleanup of the fire has never
been completed. Rocky Flats workers used gloveboxes to work with the
deadly plutonium, as shown in this 1971 photo. Some of the gloveboxes
were as big as three Winnebagos. Hundreds of pipes, top, filled with
radioactive acids are a time-consuming job for workers taking apart
the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Some pipes haven't been
handled in 40 years. Left, the plant's 155-foot water tower, built in
1952, is the site's tallest structure. Dr. John Mann, standing, takes
a look at Ronald Liskey in the early 1970s. Contamination has been a
constant risk for workers at Rock Flats, though far more precautions
are being taken now, during the cleanup phase. PHOTO: The Denver Post
/John Epperson Rocky Flats, with the Denver skyline in the
background, is expected to cost $7.7 billion to clean up. An
estimated 16,000 pounds of high-grade plutonium has to be moved from
the site. The Denver Post/Peter Pauley The isolated installation
(map) The Denver Post/Thomas McKay What they did at Rocky Flats The
Denver Post Radiation doses at Rocky Flats U.S. government
expenditures, 1940-1996    *****