Lessons of Rocky flats: three state and federal agencies set aside distrust to clean up one of America's dirtiest Superfund sites.

• Author: Dreyer, Evan
• Position: Cover Story

Hillside 881. It certainly wasn't the dirtiest spot within Colorado's 6,250-acre Rocky Flats plant--a Superfund site of epic proportions that had once been a nuclear weapons complex during the Cold War.

Eighteen drums of buried radioactive and chemical goop were leaking and needed to be excavated from the hillside. But the state Department of Public Health and Environment, federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) disagreed over how to proceed. Bureaucratic red tape--writing reports, taking samples, analyzing results and doing it all again--tied the project up in a year-long knot.

But when the state and EPA reluctantly allowed DOE to dig up the drums without completing all the analyses they would have liked, it marked a tectonic shift in how these three agencies would approach the site cleanup from then on.

Instead of costing $50 million as initially estimated, the tab for removing the drums was $200,000. Crews finished the work over a long weekend.

That was a dozen years ago. Ever since, the state, DOE and EPA have set aside long-held mistrust, united behind a common vision and accelerated the largest nuclear cleanup project in world history. By adopting a bias for action--seeking to do the work rather than engage in endless studies--the $6.8 billion project will be $500 million under budget and a year under deadline.

The final cleanup stages of Rocky Flats will be completed by Halloween 2005, with hundreds of buildings decontaminated and demolished and tons of radioactive waste hauled out of state. Most of the site--except for 1,000 acres that will remain under DOE control for ongoing environmental and ecological monitoring--will be turned over to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to become a wildlife refuge.

By 2008, public hiking, biking and horse-riding trails will begin to traverse prairie land once sealed off by razor-wire fencing and protected by heavily armed guards.

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman cites the "hand-in-glove cooperation" by local, state and federal authorities as the project's hallmark. He hopes to see it replicated elsewhere as DOE and other states undertake similar projects.

"It's truly remarkable what can be accomplished by hard work, cooperation and innovation," Bodman says.

The hope is that other states will benefit from Colorado's experience.

"The lesson of Rocky Flats is that it can be done," says Steve Gunderson, Colorado's Rocky Flats cleanup coordinator. "It isn't easy and you aren't going to please everybody. But if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere."

COLD WAR IN COLORADO

Located 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver, Rocky Flats hugs the Rocky Mountain foothills. Though the site is now almost vacant, the Denver skyline remains visible in the distance, a stark reminder that more than 2 million people live in close proximity to what once was a part of the nuclear weapons complex.

The federal government broke ground here in 1951 and started production in 1952, and for the next 37 years workers assembled plutonium detonators, or triggers, for nuclear warheads. They produced at least 70,000 triggers, essentially smaller bombs used to detonate larger warheads. Nearly every nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal passed through Rocky Flats.

Three radioactive ingredients dominated production: plutonium, uranium and americium. Other hazardous materials, including beryllium, PCBs, sulfuric acid and carbon tetrachloride, round out the list of toxins that ultimately polluted Rocky Flats.

The heaviest processing activity occurred within a 385-acre centralized industrial zone. Nearly 800 structures, ranging from mammoth buildings with 360,000 square feet of space and 4-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls to tiny guard shacks, once cluttered the industrial area.

The on-site environmental damage was devastating.

Glovebox fires in 1957 and 1969 released plumes of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. In 1967, crews discovered that 5,200 drums sitting outside in the open on the 903 pad were leaking plutonium-laced hydraulic oils. More than 360 separate potential spill areas were identified.

The site was home to 13 "infinity rooms," rooms so radioactive that instruments spiked off the scales when anyone took measurements. Building 771 was labeled the most dangerous building in America. A DOE Plutonium Vulnerability Study found Rocky Flats harbored five of the nation's most vulnerable facilities, including the top two. Public outrage ebbed and flowed. At times, protesters tried to form human chains around the entire facility, peaceful demonstrations in the global call for disarmament.

"The place was just a mess," Gunderson says.

Suddenly, however, production halted.

Tipped off to alleged illegal dumping activity, 80 FBI and EPA agents raided Rocky Flats on June 6, 1989, and shut it down. "But it was a dirty shutdown because everyone expected production would resume," says Len Ackland, a University of Colorado professor who wrote a book about Rocky Flats...