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"Rocky Flats is the flagship site . . . in demonstrating tangible and significant progress toward safe closure of former nuclear weapons production sites," said U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department is managing the cleanup. "The safe closure of Rocky Flats by 2006 is a top priority."
Much information about Rocky Flats still is classified by the government as top secret. To tell how the 700-building complex became so contaminated - and how it will be decontaminated - The Denver Post interviewed dozens of workers, reviewed thousands of pages of records and toured bomb-making buildings that remain protected by anti-aircraft guns, foot-thick vaults and guards with submachine guns.
Put simply, Rocky Flats is a mess.
One highly polluted bomb building, the size of three football fields, was described in 1994 as the most dangerous building in America. Another was so heavily contaminated by a plutonium fire that engineers finally quit trying to clean it and instead built a false ceiling to entrap the splattered radioactivity above workers' heads. At an outdoor pad that once stored 5,200 drums of radioactive waste, an underground plume of plutonium, oil and carcinogenic industrial solvents is seeping downhill.
Nobody envisioned such major pollution problems on March 23, 1951, when the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the nation was building a top-secret nuclear weapons plant in a rocky but flat ranching area of Jefferson County. The Denver Post heralded the government decision with a front-page headline: "There's good news today." The story ran next to a Korean War photo with the headline: "20,000 Reds Flee Yank Paratroopers."
By the time the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik into space in 1957, Rocky Flats had become the linchpin in the nation's nuclear bomb system. Rocky Flats took plutonium, made by other government plants or recycled from old warheads in the field, and turned it into one of the most highly engineered devices ever made by man - plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear bombs.
A hollow sphere that varies in size from a grapefruit to a soccer ball, a plutonium pit explodes with the power of a Hiroshima bomb. During World War II, that was enough to kill 140,000 people.
But in today's nuclear arsenal, the pit serves mainly as a starter that ignites the final firepower of a thermonuclear weapon; a pit is the compact A-bomb that detonates the overall H-bomb. In modern warheads, Rocky Flats pits set off weapons 600 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, which itself was the explosive equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
According to declassified reports, the government made about 70,000 pits while Rocky Flats operated from 1953 to 1989. That's equal to five pits a day.
It's hard to walk through the inner reaches of Rocky Flats today without feeling at least a little unnerved. In the coldest days of the Cold War, up to 8,000 workers entered here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to build the most deadly devices ever invented.
Visitors must pass through as many as four security stops before entering any classified section of the bomb complex. Rocky Flats spends $55 million a year on security, an amount that exceeds the annual budget for every police and sheriff's department in Colorado except Denver.
At the first Rocky Flats checkpoint, to protect against terrorist suicide missions, guards with submachine guns swab dust from the steering wheels and doors of visiting cars to check for explosives residue.
The second checkpoint is staffed by more armed guards, who screen visitors with metal detectors and scan fingers and palms with a computer that matches handprints with government records. Most people who proceed through this guard station already have received a topsecret "Q" clearance, which requires a full investigation of at least the past 10 years of their personal lives.
A third checkpoint just outside a plutonium building screens the visitor's necklace of five or so security badges to make sure the person is allowed inside. Some buildings also post a fourth security station, where more guards with submachine guns check visitor badges behind a portal of bulletproof glass and 4-inch-thick metal doors.
The perimeter of the 385-acre pit production area is surrounded by two razor-wire fences, security cameras and prison-like watch towers with more armed guards. To foil helicopter landings, anti-aircraft guns are stationed on the roofs of several buildings.
If all the outdoor security feels spooky, it's just a prelude for what lies inside the plutonium buildings. And one place looms largest in Rocky Flats lore - Building 771.
"It's known as the Hole. It's the worst damn building in the whole complex," said Tony DeMaiori, who has worked at the complex for 20 years.
A windowless two-story concrete structure dug into a hillside in 1951, Building 771 was the world's first factory-sized plutonium processing plant. Almost every nuclear weapon ever made by the United States started here.
It was not clean work.
Building 771 took scraps of plutonium, or tainted plutonium from old warheads, and recycled it into gray buttons, or ingots, roughly the size of a hockey puck. Purifying the plutonium required vast amounts of nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride and caustics.
Almost all work was done inside the building's 217 gloveboxes, aquarium-like containers that ranged in size from one minivan to three Winnebagos. Each glovebox was outfitted with several pairs of elbow-length gloves, made of rubber and lead, which protected workers' hands from radiation while handling plutonium.
With 147,900 square feet of cauldrons, precipitators, furnaces and a giant incinerator, Building 771 helped win the Cold War by turning hundreds of retired old pits into powerful new ones.
But the same chemicals that liquefied and purified plutonium also ate through overhead plumbing.
The result: Leak after leak after leak.
"Occasionally you'd feel a drip on your head and you'd be contaminated with plutonium nitrate," DeMaiori said.
In the vocabulary of Rocky Flats, contamination was "crap." Workers sprayed with radioactivity were "crapped up." Workers sprayed with so much radioactivity that they exceeded the government's annual dose limits - and were forced out of plutonium areas and into desk-job assignments - were "crapped out."
Jim Kelly, who worked 23 years in Building 771, said his worst moment came when coworkers heaving a drum of plutonium waste into the incinerator accidentally dropped it down his back.
"They dumped a barrel of crap on me. Oh, it was a hellhole to work in," he said.
"771 was a building that was feared, and the reason was leaks - leaks from the pipes, leaks from the valves, leaks from the boxes. There were incidents there every day, every week, every year that I worked there.
"There was always tape or plastic on something to stop the leaks. It looked like a building that had 5 million Band-Aids slapped on it."
Still, workers kept coming back to the Hole. One reason was the terrific camaraderie forged by terrible working conditions. Another reason was "hot pay." When Kelly started work in 1956, hot pay was an extra dime an hour on top of the $2 standard wage. Today the top rank-and-file decontamination workers make $20 an hour, or $30 per hour for time in a moon suit with an oxygen tank.
With hot pay comes risk. Al Williams remembers working with his arms deep in a glovebox when he felt some warmth on his leg.
It was leaking plutonium solution.
"There was a hole in the box," Williams said. "Things were different in the old days."
John Goodnow doesn't even know when he was contaminated. After finishing a routine inspection of a plutonium tank-draining area, he got ready to leave for the locker room.
Then a co-worker with a radiation meter found something on Goodnow's safety bootie.
"You can't see it or feel it or taste it or smell it, but it was there," Goodnow said. "I must have just walked across something." His dose was small and is not expected to pose any health problems. But another Building 771 employee, Don Gable, died of brain cancer at age 31, in 1980, after working part of every day with his head 6 inches from a plutonium nitrate pipe. The government lost the dead man's brain before an autopsy could check for radiation.
One storage tank area was so plagued with leaks that workers called it the "snake pit" and dreaded the shifts when they were assigned to clean it.
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