Rocky Flats
Problems among workers in the reactor industry are just starting to surface, but such complaints have long been common at the Rocky Flats plutonium factory near Denver. Rocky Flats is the "Grand Central Station" of the nuclear weapons industry. It recycles fissionable materials from "obsolete" bombs, and it also produces plutonium "triggers" for new ones. Its core is an elaborate system of ventilated stainless-steel glove boxes where workers smelt, press, machine, polish, and measure the plutonium for America’s nuclear bombs.
Rocky Flats was operated under government contract by Dow Chemical from the time it opened in 1953 until 1975, when management was taken over by Rockwell International. Dissatisfaction with both Dow and Rockwell has been widespread, and numerous fires and spills have plagued the plant. At least 325 workers are known to have been seriously contaminated in that period. One 1958 survey of an on-site cafeteria showed contamination in fifty of fifty-four areas above "allowable tolerances" for plutonium.93 In 1965—a year in which at least forty-five workers were contaminated with plutonium—a local union attempted to establish a management-worker safety committee. Dow Chemical management refused to cooperate. In October of that year a fire contaminated an entire production crew of twenty-five workers with up to seventeen times the maximum allowable exposure.94
Since the plant opened, thousands of people have been employed at Rocky Flats. But no reliable independent health survey of the work force has ever been published. And some of the indications that have surfaced are not encouraging and have resulted in fierce court battles that may have a profound impact on all radiation-related work to come.
Don Gabel, for example, began work at Rocky Flats fresh out of high school in 1969. A significant part of his day was spent operating a furnace that treated plutonium. In one case a pipe leaked nitric acid laced with plutonium onto his head. Despite assurances from his boss, Gabel became concerned about the effects of working near so much radiation. In one case the pipe that he worked near for long periods of time was tested and "pegged the needle off the dial."95
In 1979, after a decade in the plant, Gabel began to suffer from serious headaches, then seizures. Doctors found a malignant brain tumor, which could not be removed. Gabel finally had to move his wife and three children to the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, hoping to be saved by experimental treatment. It failed. In the fall of 1980 Don Gabel died at the age of thirty. An ensuing autopsy revealed significant quantities of plutonium and americium in his lungs, liver, and bones.
Three months before his death Gabel filed a workers compensation claim against Rockwell International. His wife is pursuing the battle.
The case of Dan Karkenan, a college-trained professional who began work at Rocky Flats in 1968, was never resolved. Karkenan was a mechanical engineer who helped in the cleanup and reconstruction of Rocky Flats after a fire on May 11, 1969, seriously contaminated the plant and sent an uncertain amount of plutonium into the areas south of the plant.
By the spring of 1975 Karkenan began showing symptoms of numbness in his fingers and toes, followed by a loss of coordination and then paralysis in his arms and legs. Doctors were unable to diagnose Karkenan’s disease, but he and his family were convinced it could be traced to his work during the cleanup after the 1969 fire, when the entire Rocky Flats area was heavily contaminated.96 Just before Karkenan died in 1976, he asked his wife Miriam to have tissue samples examined as a part of his autopsy—as was later done with Don Gabel. But when she authorized the autopsy, Miriam Karkenan was told by the hospital that permission was required from Rockwell before her husband’s tissues could be analyzed for radioactivity. After three months of wrangling with the company, she obtained permission—and was then told by the hospital that the tissues had been discarded. Karkenan continued to pursue her husband’s records from Rockwell International and in late 1979 was sent a "report" ostensibly detailing her husband’s exposure history. The document discussed Dan Karkenan’s "on-the-job" exposures in 1977, 1978, and 1979—three years after he was already dead.97
One landmark case of immense potential impact has been won—against Dow Chemical for its operation of Rocky Flats. It involves the family of Leroy Krumback. Krumback worked with plutonium at Rocky Flats from 1959 through 1974, when he died at age sixty-five of colon cancer. His widow Florence was never told how much exposure her husband was getting, but remembered him coming home often with his hands rubbed raw from Clorox scrubs designed to remove contamination, and with descriptions of how his eyes, nostrils, and feet had been contaminated as well. Florence Krumback’s attempts to receive compensation for her husband’s death dragged on fruitlessly until 1979, when a young lawyer named Bruce DeBoskey joined her case.
His involvement was well timed. By 1980 public sentiment in Denver and surrounding communities had swung sharply against Rocky Flats. Colorado’s governor Richard Lamm had urged President Carter to move the plant to another state, and a business group, organized in part by a local contractor named Rex Haag, was actively working to shut Rocky Flats down.
In February, Dr. Alice Stewart testified at Krumback’s compensation hearing. Krumback’s records showed he had received 45.67 rems of whole body exposure, which Dow Chemical claimed was a safe dose. But Stewart calculated that the actual "effective" dose was much higher because Krumback had received a substantial portion of it while over the age of forty, when his sensitivity to radiation was greater. His "effective" dose, said Stewart, was more like 222 rems, far more than enough to cause his cancer.98
At another hearing in August of 1980 Dr. Karl Z. Morgan found it "unthinkable" that records showed Krumback had on ten separate occasions been allowed to exceed his quarterly exposure limit. "I am appalled at what happened," said Morgan, who had worked for twenty-eight years as a top health officer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He commented that he would have shut down Oak Ridge if similar exposures had been shown there. He estimated the effective plutonium dose to Krumback’s colon in the thousands of rems, and agreed with Dr. Stewart that the plutonium exposure was more than sufficient to cause Krumback’s cancer.99
With the unexpected addition of testimony from Drs. Stewart and Morgan, Dow Chemical saw what had seemed like a routine suit—destined for denial—turn into a watershed battle. On June 3, 1981, the tide turned toward the nuclear workers. Colorado granted Florence Krumback a twenty-one-thousand-dollar settlement, which seemed bound to open the door for a whole backlog of suits like those of the Gabel family. The sum was a small fraction of the medical expenses from Leroy Krumback’s illness. But Florence Krumback hoped her victory would help force the industry to make the changes in the radioactive workplace. "If it saves one life," she said, "then it will be worth it."100
93. Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, p. 24.
94. Ibid., p. 25.
95. Don Gabel, interview with film makers of Dark Circle: A Documentary on Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Power, produced by the Independent Documentary Group (395 Elizabeth St., San Francisco, CA 94114; 1981) (hereafter cited as Dark Circle).
96. Citizens’ Hearings.
97. Ibid.
98. Alice M. Stewart, testimony before the Colorado Workers Compensation Department hearings, Krumback v. Dow Chemical, February 1980.
99. Karl Z. Morgan, testimony before the Colorado Workers Compensation Department hearings, Krumback v. Dow Chemical, August 1980.
100. Pamela Avery, "Rocky Flats Cancer Death Blamed on Radiation," Rocky Mountain News, June 4, 1981, p. 4. While the commercial reactor industry is undergoing a serious decline, well hidden from the public eye is the proposed massive expansion of nuclear weapons production. Insofar as military strategic policy serves as the vehicle of the nuclear arms race, the plants that make fissionable material, manufacture bomb components, and assemble them make up the engine. Because several of these weapons plants have reached the end of their productive cycle of thirty years, the federal government is already moving to commit the nation to another thirty years of large-scale nuclear weapons material production.