Full Body Burden (60 page)

There are some people, of course, who believe that the story of Rocky Flats should remain hidden or be quickly forgotten, and that the environmental impact, both short and long term, is inconsequential. Construction of roads and new houses around Rocky Flats continues at a rapid pace, despite the concerns of local citizens. But even those in the government don’t necessarily agree with the emphasis on business interests over human health and the environment. I received a fascinating e-mail from a man with three
engineering degrees who had served as a captain in the U.S. Army, as the chief of Reactor Systems in the United States for the DOE, and as director of Risk Management for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He worked at Rocky Flats and also with the accidents at Three Mile Island and the Crystal River Nuclear Plant in the United States, as well as Chernobyl and Fukushima. He writes, “I noted the sentence ‘Production takes precedence over safety.’ That sentence says it all.”

These kinds of stories—stories that have been kept secret or hidden or overlooked for years—are essential for us, as a culture, to hear and understand as we consider how to deal with the environmental and health legacies of our nuclear industry, and how to move forward into the future.

Q: Why did you write the book?

A: Rocky Flats was the big secret of my childhood. No one knew what they did at the plant; the rumor in the neighborhood was that they made household cleaning products. We knew nothing about radioactive and toxic contamination. My childhood was also shadowed by the secrecy surrounding my father’s alcoholism. My family was very close and loving but also troubled. I wrote the book to learn what really happened at Rocky Flats, to learn everything I could about plutonium pits and nuclear weapons and the crucial role the plant played during and after the Cold War. I also wanted to understand my family and the broader context of what it meant to grow up during the seventies. Secrecy, at the level of the community and at the level of family, turned out to be a central theme in the book.

One of the great ironies of my life is that I spent several years as a travel writer in Europe, looking for good stories to write about, and the biggest story turned out to be—quite literally—in my own backyard. My family and our neighbors were “Cold War warriors,” as the plutonium workers themselves were called, but no one told us.

Q: How is Rocky Flats a global issue?

A: The 2011 accident at Fukushima, following the tsunami, was a dramatic reminder that we cannot ignore the threat of radioactive contamination, whether it comes from nuclear power plants or nuclear weapons sites. The world has experienced many nuclear disasters in recent years, including accidents at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, the Mayak facility in Russia (the “sister” plant to Rocky Flats), Rocky Flats in Colorado, and other former nuclear weapons sites around the United States such as Hanford and Fernald. The health effects of short-term, high-level radioactive contamination are fairly well known. What are the health costs of long-term, low-level radioactive exposure? Scientists and physicists continue to debate the topic, but one fact is for sure: there is no safe level of exposure to plutonium. One millionth of a gram, particularly if it is inhaled, can cause cancer.

Rocky Flats happened in my backyard, but in a sense it is happening in everyone’s backyard. Many of us live in close proximity to former nuclear weapons sites or nuclear power plants with inadequate safety provisions. And at a time when we are supposed to be decreasing our nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government is talking about producing nuclear triggers again. We need to pay attention.

Q: Was it hard to write so intimately about your family?

A: I believe that the most powerful way to tell a story is through personal, everyday experience. Every person on the planet has a story that is both ordinary and extraordinary. My siblings and I swam in the lake behind our house and rode our horses in the fields. We had, in many ways, a
blessed childhood. And this kind of experience is one that many readers will share. What makes our story unique is that it connects, in ways that we never anticipated, to a broader historical and political narrative. The story of the 1969 fire at Rocky Flats—which very nearly destroyed the entire metro Denver area—is all the more powerful when you realize that my family was having a very pleasant Mother’s Day brunch at a nearby restaurant. We had no idea what was going on—and neither did other Coloradoans. It was only by including the experiences of me, my family, my neighbors, and my coworkers at Rocky Flats that I could truly bring the story to life. It was indeed a challenge to write intimately about things that, as a family, we were never supposed to discuss, including my father’s drinking. And yet the end result was a tremendous sense of clarity and understanding.

Q: What surprised you most during your research for the book?

A: I was surprised, and continue to be surprised, by the secrecy surrounding this very dramatic story. What happened at Rocky Flats, during the Cold War and up to the present moment, is crucially important not only to Colorado but to the entire country. But so much of the story has been hidden over the years, and now it is in danger of being forgotten. Recently I stayed at a hotel just a few miles from the Rocky Flats site, and the young man at the front desk had grown up in Colorado. He’d never heard of Rocky Flats. Of those people who do know the story—or part of it—many believe that Rocky Flats is old history, that it’s irrelevant and insignificant. They believe the land is safe and the story is over. After all, you can’t see or smell plutonium.

Yet we cannot forget the story of Rocky Flats. The effects will linger far into the future.

There were many other surprises, too. During my research, I was shocked to discover how many tons of MUF—or “material unaccounted for”—plutonium there were, even to the present day. And the history of the 1989 FBI raid on Rocky Flats is fascinating. I believe it’s the only time in the history of the United States that two government agencies—the FBI and the EPA—have raided another agency, the Department of Energy.

Q: Can you talk about the juxtaposition of the toxicity of Rocky Flats and the rugged beauty of Colorado?

A: Colorado is a beautiful state, and the area near Rocky Flats is especially stunning. The rolling hills leading up to the line of mountains, including the Flatirons, are very dramatic. People hike and bike and walk with their dogs. And the location is ideal—Rocky Flats is just minutes from Boulder and a short drive from Denver. Yet despite Colorado’s reputation as a healthy state with an outdoorsy lifestyle, the truth is that there have been many environmental problems. Rocky Flats is simply the most notorious. The land looks beautiful, but there are places where the soil will be radioactive for the next 24,000 years.

Also, contaminants escape into the local water supply, and citizens question whether the site is being adequately monitored. As I write this, there is a controversy about plans to open portions of the former site of Rocky Flats to the public as a “wildlife refuge,” despite some scientists’ warnings that it remains unsafe. The U.S. Department of Energy also maintains a website on Rocky Flats at
www.​lm.​doe.​gov/​rocky_​flats/​Sites.​aspx
.

Q: Was there one moment when you knew you had to take action?

A: I have thought about writing this book since I was a child. Rocky Flats was such a mystery to me! After college, I lived in Germany for several years, and I wanted to be in Berlin when the Berlin Wall came down. As it turned out, I had to come back to the States just before that occurred, and I watched it on television. It struck me then that there was a connection between what had just happened in Berlin and what was happening in Colorado at Rocky Flats. People thought the Cold War was over. But it wasn’t over in Colorado.

The moment that really shook me, though, happened during the time I was working at Rocky Flats, in my thirties. I had just put my two sons to bed. I came downstairs and turned on the television, and there was a
Nightline
special on Rocky Flats. It was shocking. I learned that I was working next to fourteen tons of plutonium, most of it unsafely stored. The plant was a mess. Plant manager Mark Silverman was fairly forthright in describing the terrible state of the facility. To his credit, he felt that it was time to begin to tell the truth about Rocky Flats. (Sadly, Silverman himself died of cancer not long after his work at Rocky Flats.) How could I work at the plant and not know all these things? The next morning, when I went into work, some employees expressed shock and others thought the press was just exaggerating. That day I knew I had to quit, and I knew I would research and write a book. I wanted to understand the story—the whole story.

Q: Explain your writing process. Did you use any of the journals you kept as reference while writing the book?

A: I’ve kept a journal since I was a small child. I was the kind of kid who had to write everything down—notes, stories, my experiences and feelings—so I had a wealth of personal material to draw upon. I worked at the plant for a short time to support myself and my two children while I was in graduate school, and during that time I quietly took notes on everything. I felt like a Cold War Harriet the Spy. I write to remember and understand.

This book involved twelve years of research and writing, and the bulk of the research was investigative. I read court documents, technical reports, EPA and DOE documentation, and all of the Rocky Flats interviews—dozens and dozens—held at the Maria Rogers Oral History Project at the Carnegie Library in Boulder, Colorado. I conducted dozens of new interviews myself. It was a huge project to weave all of this information together, make sure it was accurate, and tell a good story.

Q: For people who want to know more about the hazards of former nuclear weapons sites and nuclear power on our environment, where should they go? How can they get involved?

A: Two excellent sources of information regarding nuclear issues are the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (
www.thebulletin.org
) and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (
www.wagingpeace.org
). For news about Rocky Flats, an organization called Nuclear Guardianship (
www.​rocky​flats​nuclear​guardian​ship.​org
) is a good source regarding past and ongoing issues.

Q: Your book reveals the repeated instances in which the effects of Rocky Flats were hidden or downplayed
by Rockwell International, Dow Chemical, and the Department of Energy. How was this possible? And why did this happen?

A: The Atomic Energy Commission—which later became the Department of Energy—was established after World War II. Its primary purposes were to develop the U.S. arsenal of nuclear weapons and to test nuclear bombs. There was no environmental regulation or oversight, especially in the early years. Due to Cold War secrecy, most AEC operations—and their effect on the environment and local populations—were completely unknown to the public. It wasn’t until the 1970s that nuclear weapons sites were forced to comply with environmental laws and regulations, though even then they often skirted them. Private operators of U.S. weapons plants, like Rockwell and Dow Chemical, operated on a for-profit basis and were not held legally or financially accountable for accidents, leaks, or problems. Production was the only thing that mattered. Even after the EPA was established, nuclear weapons facilities argued that they should be exempt from EPA regulation.

Kristen Iversen grew up in Arvada, Colorado, near the Rocky Flats nuclear weaponry facility and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Memphis and also editor in chief of
The Pinch
, an award-winning literary journal. During the summers, she serves on the faculty of the MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of New Orleans, held in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is also the author of
Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth
, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Iversen has two sons and currently lives in Memphis.

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