Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

Author:Kristen Iversen [Iversen, Kristen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-95564-7
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2013-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

THE INCINERATOR at our little old house in Arvada is long gone and turned into a garden planter by the new owners. We don’t have an incinerator at the house in Bridledale; the burning of household trash is now banned and a noisy truck rattles down our street once a week to pick up the bags of trash we lug to the end of the driveway.

Rocky Flats follows different rules. A $2 million, three-thousand-square-foot “trash compactor,” or fluidized bed incinerator, was completed in July 1979 and housed in Building 776, the same building in which the 1969 Mother’s Day fire occurred. Designed and built by Rocky Flats workers to burn plutonium-contaminated waste, the “plutonium recovery” incinerator is the only one of its kind in the United States and perhaps in the world. Intended to operate around the clock, the incinerator makes its first continuous 108-hour run in 1979. But no one outside the plant learns of the active incinerator until 1986—seven years after it began operating. Even then, no one knows exactly what the incinerator burns or if it adequately filters waste. Dr. Edward Martell and a group of scientists submit a paper to the government, the health department, and the EPA opposing the incinerator, as the incinerator releases plutonium and other contaminants into the air and creates a health and environmental hazard. Rocky Flats and DOE officials deny any danger and continue to operate the incinerator. Following a meeting of several hundred local residents at a high school gymnasium, Gene Towne, a spokesman for Rockwell at Rocky Flats, says “the majority of the material was office paper and paint thinner,” although Rockwell’s director of plutonium operations later admits to the press that the incinerator had been used to burn eighteen tons of radioactive material.

The problem with Rocky Flats is not just a smoking chimney or a hole in the dike. The weapons plant is like a bag filled with ultrafine sand—a bag filled with millions of glittering, radioactive specks too tiny to see—and the bag has been pricked with pins.

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