Plutonium Pancakes.

• Author: Fantle, Will
• Position: Controversy over Colorado plan to sewage sludge that may be radioactive as fertilizer

Fifteen miles from downtown Denver is the sprawling 480-acre site known as the former Lowry Landfill. Between 1950 and 1980, millions of gallons of hazardous industrial wastes were pumped into shallow, unlined pits by the region's powerful corporate and governmental entities.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the Lowry Landfill a Superfund site in 1984. Now the EPA wants to treat the contaminated groundwater at the landfill and discharge it into the Denver metro sewage system. The sewage system could then use the sludge from the treated water to fertilize Colorado farmlands.

Citizens' groups are not happy about that. They say the landfill is widely contaminated with highly radioactive plutonium and other deadly wastes. "This is a plan to legally pump plutonium into the sewer line," says Adrienne Anderson, a lawyer and an instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Plutonium is one of the most deadly substances on the planet. A speck, when deposited in the lung, can cause cancer.

Anderson and her students have been digging for the past several years into the vast files amassed by the EPA on the Lowry site. Anderson estimates that she and her students have examined 200,000 documents. In the process, they have uncovered the "smoking gun," she claims. The document, dated December 13, 1991, is entitled "Preliminary Evaluation of Potential Department of Energy Radioactive Wastes." It found that the levels of plutonium and radioactive americium "detected at Lowry Landfill are 10 to 10,000 times greater than the average or maximum background levels reported for Rocky Flats," the notorious nuclear weapons plant near Boulder. This was not a document submitted by some citizens' group. It was hand-delivered in 1991 to the EPA from the Lowry Coalition, the group of corporate and governmental polluters of the site.

These polluters include political heavyweights like Adolph Coors (which once produced nuclear fuel assemblies), Lockheed Martin, the region's two biggest newspapers--the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, Rockwell (the operator of the U.S. Department of Energy's Rocky Flats bomb plant), Conoco, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Waste Management. Government agencies on the list include the city and county of Denver, the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, and even the EPA, which disposed of pesticides and other lab wastes at the site.

Gwen Hooten, at EPA's Region 8 office in Denver, is in charge of the Lowry cleanup. She...