Disaster at Rocky Flats
Two decades before that incident a devastating but little-known fire at Rocky Flats laced the Colorado winds with deadly plutonium.
Built in the early 1950s at a cost of $240 million, the huge factory produces plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs. It sprawls at the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, its tall stacks jutting out of the flatlands. Steady winds rush through the canyons and into those plains, often reaching blasts of up to eighty miles per hour—and quite often heading toward Denver, sixteen miles to the east/southeast.
In fact the air currents are so powerful that in the late 1970s the Department of Energy chose a patch of land just west of the plutonium plant as its prime national site for testing windmill components.
As a key link in the cold war rush to nuclear supremacy Rocky Flats was built under great secrecy. The handling of large quantities of plutonium at the plant was not made public until 1955, two years after it had opened. There was no public input into choosing the site. The military, said Dr. Tony Robbins, former director of the Colorado Department of Health, "made a decision to place a plant with a large quantity of plutonium and a lot of other trace elements pretty much within the Denver metropolitan area." The siting was "clearly a mistake."11 Approximately 600,000 people live within twenty miles of the plant.
A major component of the Rocky Flats operation is the glove box production line. In it lumps of plutonium are measured, machined, milled, and shaped to use in bomb triggers. The material is kept in airtight boxes and manipulated by workers from the outside who use rubber gloves fastened to the boxes, thus avoiding any contact with the toxic metal inside.
But plutonium can catch fire spontaneously in air. In the evening of September 11, 1957, some of the "skulls" on the glove box line of Room 180 in Building 771 ignited. The fire was found by two plant production men shortly after 10:00 P.M.
The area was designed to be fireproof. But it was soon a radioactive inferno. Firemen switched on ventilating fans, but that backfired, spreading flames to still more plutonium. They then sprayed carbon dioxide into the area.
That also failed. Meanwhile the filters designed to trap plutonium escaping up the stacks caught fire. The shift captain and other observers reported a billowing black cloud pouring some 80 to 160 feet into the air above the 150-foot-high stack of Building 771.
As the crisis intensified, plant officials struggled to find a solution. They knew water would destroy millions of dollars’ worth of complex equipment. They also knew the intense heat might flash the water into enough steam to blast into an explosion and send even more plutonium particles flying toward Denver. But when the carbon dioxide failed, there was no alternative. In the early hours of the morning water began pouring into the blaze. Fortunately it worked. The fire went dead roughly thirteen hours after it began.12
The damage was extensive. Initial AEC reports contended that there was "no spread of radioactive contamination of any consequence." Seth Woodruff, manager of the Rocky Flats AEC office, told the local media that "possibly" some radiation had escaped. "But if so," he emphasized, "the spread was so slight it could not immediately be distinguished from radioactive background at the plant.13
But—as at Three Mile Island twenty-two years later—there was no reliable equipment operable at the time to monitor the amount of radiation that actually went out the stacks. Not until a week after the fire were working gauges installed. Then, in a single day, emissions registered sixteen thousand times the permissible level—a full fifty years’ worth of the allowable quota.
Some fourteen to twenty kilograms were estimated to have burned in the fire, enough to make at least two bombs equivalent to the one dropped on Nagasaki.14 And that may not have been the worst of it. According to a study based on figures from Dow Chemical, which operated Rocky Flats at the time, some thirteen grams of plutonium were routinely deposited daily on the first stage of filters in Building 771. According to government documents obtained in a lawsuit against the plant, the 620 filters in the building’s main plenum had not been changed since they were installed four years before the fire. Thus a pair of local researchers theorized that as much as 250 kilograms of airborne plutonium could have gone out the stacks from the burning filters alone.15
Such an enormous release of plutonium struck some in the Denver area as beyond plausibility. But a much lower estimate of 48.8 pounds of plutonium—one tenth of the 250-kilogram figure—was calculated as enough to administer each of the 1.4 million people in the Denver environs a radiation dose one million times the maximum permissible lung burden.16 "I find the high release estimates hard to believe," we were told by Dr. John Cobb of the University of Colorado Medical School. "But even if only one gram of plutonium escaped, as the plant operators say, that would be cause for concern."17 Nor was plutonium the fire’s only by-product. The water used to extinguish it became infused with radioactivity. In this case some thirty thousand gallons of it escaped unfiltered, thus spreading its contamination into local streams and the water table.
Through the whole crisis there had been no warning to local schools, health departments, police, or elected officials that something extraordinary and dangerous was happening at Rocky Flats. There were no backup plans for evacuation, no notification to area farmers or ranchers to safeguard their health or that of their animals.
And though some of the buildings were heavily contaminated, bomb-trigger production was back under way within a few days. Over the next thirteen months, Rocky Flats’s operators recorded twenty-one fires, explosions, spills of radioactive material, and contamination incidents inside the plant.18
11. Rocky Flats Action Group, Local Hazard, Global Threat Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant (Rocky Flats Action Group, 2239 E. Colfax, Denver, CO, 1977), p. 3 (hereafter cited as Local Hazard).
12. Carl Johnson, "Comments on the 1957 Fire at the Rocky Flats Plant, in Jefferson County, Colorado," report to the Conference on the Relation of Environmental Pollution to the Cancer Problem in Colorado, at the American Medical Center Cancer Research Center and Hospital in Lakewood, Colorado, September 1980 (hereafter cited as "Comments"); and Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, pp. 27-28.
13. Denver Post, September 12, 1957.
14. Johnson,"Comments."
15. For the 250-kilogram estimate, Johnson in "Comments" cites R. W. Woodward, "Plutonium Particulate Study in Booster System No. 3 (Building 771) Filter Plenum" (Golden, Colo.: The Rocky Flats Plant, January 27, 1971); and H. Holme and S. Chinn, "Pre-Trial Statement," Civil Action Nos. 75-M-1111, 75-M-1162, and 75-M-1296 (Denver: U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, 1978). See also, J. B. Owen, "Reviews of the Exhaust Air Filtering and Air Sampling, Building 771," unpublished manuscript, Rocky Flats Plant, Golden, Colorado, March 14, 1963.
16. Rocky Flats Action Group, Local Hazard, p. 3; see also, F. W. Krey and E. P. Hardy, Plutonium in Soil Around the Rocky Flats Plant (New York: AEC Health and Safety Library, 1970), p. 36; Carl Johnson, et al., "Plutonium Hazard in Respirable Dust on the Surface of Soil," Science, August 6, 1979, pp. 488-490; and Jack Anderson, "Colorado Plant Eyed as Radiation Source," Washington Post, March 25, 1979, p. D25.
17. John C. Cobb, interview, May 1981.
18. Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, p. 28.