Full Body Burden (29 page)

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.

T
HE
R
OCKY
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 determined 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.”

The rally is peaceful, and at noon brightly colored balloons are released to the sky, with written warnings of how far radiation from Rocky Flats can travel attached to their strings. Some reach as far as Canada. Between speakers and music sets, or whenever there is a pause in activity, the crowd begins a low chant that grows louder with each repetition, fifteen thousand people in unison:
Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats
.

On Sunday, 286 men and women are arrested and charged with trespassing in violation of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. They offer no resistance. As they’re loaded into school buses to be taken for booking, they toss flowers out the windows at the security guards.

When the first three protesters appear before the judge, he calls them “arrogant,” finds them guilty of trespassing, and, in a lengthy statement before sentencing, quotes U.S. Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens: “If a religious, moral, or political purpose may exculpate illegal behavior, one might commit bigamy to avoid eternal damnation, steal from the rich to give alms to the poor, burn and destroy, not merely public records or perhaps buildings, but even public servants as well, to implement a utopian design.” He then issues formal instructions to all Denver federal judges that “the morality or immorality of nuclear weapons or nuclear power is not something to be tried.” He rejects the trio’s request to do
community service rather than pay their $1,000 fines and, he adds, if they don’t pay their fines on time, they “can stay in jail forever.”

Most of the defendants are convicted.

B
Y
1979, nearly 3,500 people work at Rocky Flats.
The plant bills itself as one of the safest government facilities in the country, with the number of “continuous safe hours”—work hours during which no reported accidents occurred—posted proudly on a sign near the plant entrance.

But signs can lie.

Fresh out of high school, in 1970 Don Gabel was working as a fry cook when he got the call that he’d passed the security check and could begin working as a janitor at Rocky Flats.
A year later he transferred to Building 771, the notorious plutonium processing building, where he could make an additional fifteen cents an hour in “hot pay.” Like most employees, he was told that the plant was the safest place he’d ever work.

Don learned to operate a furnace that melted plutonium, and a good part of his workday was spent with his head a few inches below a furnace pipe with a sign more appropriate for a shopping mall:
DO NOT LOITER
. Monitors showed the pipe to be highly radioactive, but Gabel was told that he was not in danger and that levels of radioactivity were well within government standards. One morning, just a few weeks after his transfer, he was instructed to tear construction tape from a contaminated tank. “That tape was really hot,” he recalled later, and sure enough, his hands, face, and hair measured 2,000 counts of alpha radiation per minute. He had to wait at the plant nearly an hour for help, which was not unusual, he later testified, as “incidents” in the hot areas were common. When Gabel was tested again in January 1976, after working at Rocky Flats for six years, radiation levels on his body measured 1 million counts per minute. Chromosomes in his blood and brain cells had been altered by radiation. He developed a tumor on the side of his head the size of a grapefruit. On September 6, 1980, Don Gabel died, leaving behind a wife and three young children.

On his last day of work he was making $8.60 an hour.

Within hours of his death, Don’s wife received a surprise call from
the DOE. They wanted to examine her husband’s brain. She gave permission for them to analyze the brain and there was an autopsy. The DOE took the brain, and she heard nothing. Finally the DOE admitted they’d lost the brain for three months. When it was rediscovered, it had deteriorated to the point where it could not be tested for the presence of plutonium.

Only a few of Don’s friends at the plant know the circumstances of his death, and many employees continue to stick to the company line regarding safety. Rocky Flats engineer Larry McGrew is one of them. He makes public presentations on the safety and desirability of nuclear energy and the products that are manufactured at the plant. “It’s ludicrous to call it a trigger,” he tells a local Optimist Club. “We’re not making triggers, folks. We’re making fuel cans.” Those fuel cans have to be shipped somewhere else to become nuclear weapons, he says. The term
fuel can
sounds innocuous enough.
As to what’s in those cans, he says they’re nothing more than “two or more subcritical masses of fissionable material processed into a classified configuration that would allow them to be triggered into a nuclear explosion by being violently shoved together to form a critical mass.” Few people understand the jargon.

In response to the negative publicity surrounding the April demonstration, some Rocky Flats workers and retirees form a group called Citizens for Energy and Freedom, and they decide to hold their own rallies. Kathy Erickson, a spokesperson for the group, tells the press that she and other workers and supporters want to dispel fears about plutonium production. “
We aren’t dying of cancer and our children aren’t deformed,” she says. “And we’re not murderers.” Although not as large as the anti-Rocky Flats rally, the counterrally has a strong turnout and speakers include Peter Brennan, labor secretary during the Nixon administration. The crowd is served popcorn, soda, and sandwiches along with miniature American flags. T-shirts are sold with “Power for the People” printed below an image of an atom. Bumper stickers read “Save Rocky Flats—Move Denver,” “Pro-Nuke and Proud,” and “Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark.”