More Fires
A continent and an ocean away, in countryside that could hardly have been less like the flatland at the foot of the Rockies, Britain was also facing a disaster from bomb production. Amid the cold, deep lakes and lush farmlands of the English north country, fire struck the plutonium production reactor at Windscale in early October 1957—less than a month after the first fire at Rocky Flats. Windscale was designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Rocky Flats made such plutonium—once it was chemically processed—into triggers.
On October 7 uranium fuel pellets in the Windscale reactor caught fire. Attempts to quench them failed. Though the plant was a military facility, word of the accident soon spread. The public was told the radiation releases were harmless, and there was no danger of an explosion. Both statements were false. Radiation monitors at the plant site and in the countryside showed high levels of contamination. As at Rocky Flats, carbon dioxide could not extinguish the fire.
On its fifth day plant officials prepared to use their last resort—water.
At 9:00 A.M. two plant technicians and a local fire chief dragged a hose to the top of the containment dome and aimed it at the flaming core within. Plant workers and firemen ducked behind steel barriers and braced themselves for the worst. As water surged through the hose, radioactive steam poured out the stacks and into the wind. There was no explosion. The core was soon flooded; danger of a meltdown was over.
But by Monday, October 14, a ban on the sale of milk had been enforced over a two-hundred-square-mile area.
Thousands of gallons of contaminated milk were dumped into the Irish Sea. Hundreds of cows, goats, and sheep were confiscated, shot, and buried. Farmers who slaughtered their animals for meat were told to send the thyroid glands to the government for testing.
Workers at the nearby Calder Hall reactor were ordered to scrub down with stiff brushes to remove contamination from their skin. Coal miners working in nearby shafts were replaced with "fresh" workers who had not been exposed to the radiation that had filtered through the mine ventilation systems. And in London, three hundred miles away, radiation monitors noted significantly increased levels.
Despite the national emergency that had been proclaimed, British officials told the public it was unlikely "in the highest degree" that anyone had been harmed by the accident.19 But several months later British officials conceded to a United Nations conference at Geneva that nearly seven hundred curies of cesium and strontium had been released, plus twenty thousand curies of I-131. The admitted iodine dose represented more than fourteen hundred times the quantity American officials later claimed had been released during the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island.20
Like its ally across the Atlantic, the British government studiously avoided systematic follow-up studies on the health of area residents. When a local health officer named Frank Madge used a Geiger counter to confirm abnormal radiation levels in mosses and lichens, officials from the British Atomic Energy Authority actively discouraged publication of his findings.21
A study of health data in downwind European countries later indicated a clear impact of the accident on infantmortality rates. It was, Dr. Ernest Sternglass told us, "as if a small bomb had been detonated in northern Great Britain."22
Eight years and eight days after the accident at Windscale—on October 15 1965—yet another major fire at Rocky Flats contaminated twenty-five workers with up to seventeen times the maximum permissible dose.
In 1968 a truck carrying contaminated soil to an off-site burial ground was found to be leaking, forcing plant operators to repave one mile of road. It was a modest measure at best, considering that the half-life of plutonium is more than twenty-four thousand years, while the "full-life" of asphalt paving is far less.23
Then, on Sunday, May 11, 1969—at a time when little Kristen Haag was likely to be playing in her sandbox six miles downwind—plutonium stored in a cabinet at Rocky Flats ignited. The flames leapt into the glove boxes of Buildings 776 and 777. At 2:27 P.M., when the fire alarms sounded, the blaze was out of control.
According to veteran reporter Roger Rapoport, author of The Great American Bomb Machine: "When company firemen reached [Building] 776-777 they found tons of flammable radiation shielding feeding the blaze. The firefighters donned respirators and charged into the dense smoke." Once again plant officials hesitated to use water. But when the carbon dioxide supplies ran out—after ten minutes—they had no choice. At times the smoke billowed so thickly that firemen were "forced to crawl out along exit lines painted on the floor." After four hours the fire was under control. But isolated areas continued to burn through the night.
The AEC first estimated the damage at three million dollars. It soon proved to be more like forty-five million dollars, ranking it as the most expensive industrial fire in American history at that time. It would take two years and hundreds of regular and part-time employees to clean up the mess. One regular plant janitor refused to help in the cleanup for fear of radiation poisoning. He was fired.
Far from letting a major radioactive fire slow down bomb production, Rocky Flats operators continued full-speed construction of a seventy-four-million-dollar addition designed to increase plant capacity by half.24
Nor were the fires the only source of contamination. Dow records showed that at least one thousand barrels of contaminated lathe oil were burned in the open air during their operation of the plant, sending unknown quantities of uranium into the air. And despite assurances to the public that no radioactive waste was being stored on site, more than fourteen hundred barrels of it were found there.
When AEC officials decided to move those barrels in the spring of 1970, a Dow report confirmed that "ten percent of the drums had holes apparently caused by rust and corrosion. . . . Many of the liquid drums developed leaks during handling or after exposure to air and sun."25
One Dow study indicated that up to forty-two grams of plutonium had been carried off by winds blowing through the drum storage area.26
Another Dow report conceded that normal plant operations were resulting in the daily release of millions of individual particles of plutonium, each of which could lodge in a human or animal lung, or be ingested with localgrown food and feed. Such particles are known to cause serious internal damage.
DOE monitoring records kept from 1970 to 1977 indicated that levels of airborne plutonium were higher in the Rocky Flats area than at any of fifty other stations around the U.S. Dust samples downwind showed plutonium concentrations 3,390 times what might be expected from fallout. Evidence also surfaced that the nearby town reservoir had been contaminated.27
Constant mishaps at Rocky Flats led to a growing distrust among area residents. As early as 1969, in the wake of the fire that spring, a group of scientists from local industries and universities asked DOE and the AEC to monitor the soil downwind. Their request was refused.
So Dr. Edward Martell, a nuclear chemist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, with considerable experience from the bomb-testing era, decided in the fall of 1969 to conduct some tests of his own. His findings confirmed some of the community’s worst fears. Abnormal plutonium levels were clearly evident in soil to the east and southeast of the plant.
Martell quickly came under attack from plant supporters. But when the AEC did its own study of downwind soil, it also had to admit to significant contamination. "We find his results are accurate," conceded a ranking military spokesman. "We don’t disagree with his new data. As far as measurements, sampling techniques, and knowledge of science, we think Martell is a very competent scientist." The AEC did, however, question Martell’s health conclusions. "While it is true," they said, "that some plutonium is escaping from the plant, we don’t believe it presents a significant health hazard to Denver."
Dr. Arthur Tamplin—at the time a leading AEC health researcher—strongly disagreed. The Martell study "shows about one trillion pure plutonium oxide particles have escaped from Rocky Flats," he warned. "These are very hot particles. You may only have to inhale 300 of them to double your risk of lung cancer." Tamplin calculated that if plutonium had been spread as Martell suggested, lung-cancer rates in Denver could rise, over time, 10 percent. An additional two thousand Coloradans could fall victim to Rocky Flats.28
19. John G. Fuller, We Almost Lost Detroit (New York: Reader’s Digest Press, 1975), p. 86. The Windscale story is told on pp. 71-87.
20. Virginia Brodine, Radioactive Contamination (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975).
21. Ibid.
22. Ernest Sternglass, interview, October 1980. High cesium levels in people eating fish caught "in the path of the Windscale effluent" are noted in E. D. Williams, et al., "Whole Body Cesium-137 Levels in Man in Scotland, 1978-9," Health Physics Journal 40 (January 1981): 1-4. The contamination seems to be coming from ongoing operations at the Windscale reprocessing facility.
23. Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, pp. 31-36.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 25.
26. S. E. Hammond, "Industrial-Type Operations as a Source of Environmental Plutonium" (Golden, Colo.: Dow Chemical Company, 1970).
27. Carl Johnson, "Cancer Incidence in an Area Contaminated with Radionuclides Near a Nuclear Installation" (report presented at a session sponsored by the Occupational Health and Safety, Environment, Epidemiology, and Radiological Health sections of the American Public Health Association at the 107th Annual Meeting, New York, November 9, 1979) (hereafter cited as "Cancer Incidence"). For a notation of contamination in the Broomfield Reservoir, see also Rocky Flats Action Group, Local Hazard, pp. 4-5.
28. Rapoport, Great American Bomb Machine, pp. 38-39.