Nearly 34 years after the FBI raided the Rocky Flats plant in Jefferson County, experts are still trying to warn the public of the danger posed by residual plutonium contamination.
Starting in 1952, the Rocky Flats plant manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons. The public didn’t learn about the true nature of the plant until 1969, after a fire — the third since the plant began operations — released plutonium outside the plant’s boundaries. The fires and improper storage and burial of radioactive waste led to widespread contamination of the property that is now the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, as well as nearby bodies of water such as the Great Western Reservoir and Standley Lake. Remediation of the site was completed in 2005, but advocates warn that lingering plutonium particles from the site still pose a threat to public health, particularly for residents of the Candelas development directly to the south of Rocky Flats.
“We have never had an adequate health study at Rocky Flats,” said Kristen Iversen, the author of Full Body Burden, during an April 4 panel discussion at Regis University. “We’ve never had an adequate epidemiological study at Rocky Flats. We have been collecting stories, and many of us here on this panel have been working on that for years — hundreds and thousands of people who are reporting illnesses.”
Among the concerns are high instances of breast cancer in women under 40 in the Denver metro area, as well as other types of cancers. “I’ve interviewed so many people, talked to so many people — neighbors or workers, friends — who are ill,” said Iversen. “One of these people is Rocky Flats daily manager Charlie Wolf, who battled unsuccessfully for compensation for the cancer he developed at Rocky Flats when I was working at Rocky Flats. He was one of the few managers who would go down into the so-called hot areas with his employees. Another person I want to mention is my neighbor and friend, Tamara. She has had surgery for numerous brain tumors. Her family lived directly downwind from Rocky Flats on Standley Lake, so they were exposed to contamination in the air and the water and the soil.”
These concerns were first expressed by Dr. Carl Johnson, the director of Jefferson County Public Health, in the 1970s. Dr. Mark Johnson [no relation], who stepped down as head of the Jefferson County Public Health Department in 2020, shared the same concerns.
“I have somewhat fallen into this group by making one comment,” shared Johnson during the Regis University panel. “Fortunately or unfortunately, it was on camera while being interviewed about Rocky Flats by a television reporter. He asked me if I would buy a house in one of the new subdivisions on the south edge of the Rocky Flats buffer zone, and I replied, ‘No, I probably wouldn’t.’ That bold response seemed to make me more new friends and more new enemies than probably anything else I have done in my career. With the possible exception of enforcing a mask mandate. … After my television interview, I received numerous calls from former workers at Rocky Flats. Some insisted that working there was the best job they ever had and they believed the nuclear exposure had added years to their life by strengthening their immune systems. Most of them, however, wanted to share with me information that they felt was being concealed or forgotten — about where nuclear and hazardous waste have been buried, much of it in the buffer zone outside of the cleanup zone, about safety procedures that had been ignored or actively flouted by management, or about the procurement of testing samples that was manipulated to get the desired results.”
Michael Ketterer, a professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, has studied the soil around Rocky Flats. “I can’t get out of my mind the fact that there’s really a hotspot here, on a national level, of plutonium in soils at Rocky Flats,” he said. “I’ve studied plutonium in many locations throughout the world, but locally near Rocky Flats, it’s kind of a hot spot.”
Despite the site’s extensive history of contamination, concerns about plutonium in the area reemerged in 2019, when testing conducted by the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority (JPPHA), a proposed north-south toll road that would ostensibly help mitigate traffic congestion in the Northwest Metro Denver area, found plutonium levels more than five times higher than the acceptable standard. On Feb, 25, 2020, Broomfield, which has historically borne the brunt of Rocky Flats contamination, voted to withdraw from the JPPHA.
While residents and local health authorities have raised concerns about plutonium contamination, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) and the Department of Energy has consistently denied that there is any public safety concern.
“Based on the information we have so far, our state experts and toxicologists do not believe there is an immediate public health threat,” read an Aug. 20, 2019 letter sent to residents after the discovery of plutonium in the soil sample.
Jon Lipsky, the former FBI agent who led the 1989 raid on Rocky Flats, disagrees. “I wouldn’t buy a house in Candelas,” he said. “If offered a house, I’d board it up and make it a big billboard not to buy there. The Candelas folks did hire an engineering company and they supposedly went out and did some sampling. Jefferson County has radiation regulations that they were trying to follow, but the snake oil is that a Geiger counter doesn’t necessarily pick up alpha emitters like plutonium.”
