Nuclear whistleblower.

• Author: Brever, Jacqueline
• Position: Journal Entry - Column

Whistleblowers will be dealt with severely and completely," said William Weston, third-in-command at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Complex, one week after the FBI raided the plant in June 1989.

His words would alter every aspect of my life forever.

Soon after I began my career in the radioactive or "hot" side of Rocky Flats in January 1984, I learned that there were significant differences between the procedures set forth in the manuals and what actually occurred in my area of plutonium recovery. I found that I was recording activities we should not have been engaging in--for example, turning off the valves at the site gauges on the high-level feed tanks when the inspectors came around. This gave the inspectors the impression that the tanks were empty, since no liquid showed through the glass.

I also recorded careless health and safety practices, such as the time in March 1987 when I was sucked into a glovebox to my waist. Someone had not bothered to replace the defective band holding the bag on the glovebox port. I went to the body counter and came up positive in americium, a deadly daughter-product of plutonium. It was written off as a statistical error of the machine.

Production took priority over everything else. If a radioactive spill occurred outside the glovebox, plastic was taped to the boxes so that the workers could continue operations. Many workers received defective badge counts or NO CURRENT DATA AVAILABLE counts when their badges read too high.

I was a staunch proponent of worker health and safety. In 1987, when the union put off consideration of a serious safety problem, I typed up some of my journal and filed a complaint. There was a phony investigation that never looked into the safety issues at all. The company that managed Rocky Flats for the Department of Energy, Rockwell International, wrote the matter off as sexual harassment and concluded I had made the entire thing up. Two months later, Rockwell received an $8.6 million award from DOE for safety and management excellence.

In 1989, I was assigned to work with a product developed in an experiment that had been shelved twenty years before. Management was excited about this material, and I was told to "keep the operation running until it falls apart." Despite many protests about the lack of safety precautions, I was ordered to produce more, and was warned that my job was on the line. Soon I developed odd-shaped bruises on my upper torso and painful, red sores on my...