Last November in Denver, Colorado, members of a federal grand jury investigating the
Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant made an appeal to President-elect Clinton.
Please direct the district attorney to appoint a special federal prosecutor or a suitable
independent person to investigate whether any federal criminal laws or rules may have
been violated during the course of the special grand jury's investigation.
But in December, the federal government began investigating the jurors themselves, and only
today the Justice Department announced it would take no action against them for allegedly
leaking what they secretly learned about the nuclear bomb factory.
But we were to exercise our own judgment.
Tonight on Frontline, inside Rocky Flats.
I was the one who was contaminated.
My face, my respirator, my hair, my hands, my sleeves, everything was hot.
Correspondent Al Austin investigates 30 years of accidents, cover-ups, and contamination
at Rocky Flats.
After all the secrecy, it turns out, no one knows what's here or what it may do.
Tonight, secrets of a bomb factory.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial
support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
At the feet of the Colorado Rockies, within sight of Denver, surrounded by farmland without
crops, a collection of ugly buildings crouches behind barbed wire.
Others are not welcome.
It is the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.
Through 40 years of Cold War, outsiders have known only that atom bomb parts were made
here, and that it was a place full of secrets.
Some have suspected it was brewing an environmental disaster, it and all the other weapons plants.
But Rocky Flats is special.
It was forced to give up some of its secrets.
This man knows a lot of those secrets, secrets he cannot tell.
Wes McKinley lives 200 miles from Rocky Flats in the southeast corner of Colorado.
He denies it's desolate here, from almost any point, he says, you can see a tree.
McKinley was a math teacher for a while, now he's pleased to call himself a cowboy.
But one day in 1990, the luck of the draw yanked him from his prairie serenity and made
him foreman of a special federal grand jury.
Did you know what you were getting into?
No, not hardly.
I didn't have any idea what a grand jury did.
For two years, an FBI agent in Denver had been uncovering Rocky Flats secrets and thought
they amounted to crimes.
The cowboy McKinley and 22 other Colorado citizens were supposed to decide whether anyone
should be put on trial.
Dan Peck, a Denver lawyer, was also selected for the Rocky Flats grand jury.
We met in the intermediate building, the federal courthouse over here.
It is a 1960s vintage building and in the far back side of it is where we met.
We would meet there for about a week a month.
For two and a half years, they met behind closed doors to hear the story of Rocky Flats.
The very first witness, a plant technician, alerted them that the story bordered on the
fantastic.
Her name was Jackie Brever.
I was working with an experimental product.
This product made me very ill and I later found out that these symptoms were radiation
sickness.
I had really odd big bruises on my body that you could touch that didn't hurt.
All of my hair on my arms fell out.
I was nauseated.
I was vomiting.
I had diarrhea for three weeks.
I had this incredible, terrible rash on my skin.
It was the most painful thing I've ever felt in my life, like the worst sunburn that you
have ever had.
I went and complained to my management.
They told me that it was from the caustic that they washed the coveralls in.
They weren't going to investigate or do anything about it, but they also were cracking the
whip on me.
We don't care what you have to do back there.
We need four or five more products this week.
Government films offer glimpses of the kind of work Jackie Brever did at Rocky Flats.
Technicians handling plutonium with lead-lined gloves inserted in a wall of glass and stainless
steel called a glove box.
Inhaling a microscopic amount of this metal could be fatal.
These pieces are machined into triggers that detonate nuclear bombs.
I was talking about the material that we were overexposing.
Jackie says when she told her bosses about unsafe conditions at the plant, they punished
her by assigning her nasty and dangerous work.
And then two weeks before she was scheduled to talk to the grand jury, something worse
happened.
They called out of line, called in for overtime to come in at 3.30 in the morning to work.
Both my and Karen's operations were running at that time, but they assigned us to another
room completely different from our normal rooms.
Just me and Jackie went into that room, just me and Jackie.
All the gloves were brand new on that glove box.
I couldn't understand why we were assigned there, but the job was a job.
She stuck her arm in.
She had to go all the way up to the top of her shoulder to get this material.
And she extended her arm and stretched that glove as far as it would go.
The alarm sounded in the room.
She had opened up a small pinhole in the end of one of the gloves.
And when she pulled out the vacuum of actually just removing her arm out of there, had brought
this fire ash up into her face.
And I was the one who was contaminated.
My face, my respirator, my hair, my hands, my sleeves, everything was hot.
I remember looking in that window at her and feeling like I was going to weep.
There she was.
I still feel that way too.
Totally contaminated.
She had it on her face.
She was breathing it because she didn't know.
All I could see was Karen's face in the window and the door.
It was the saddest thing.
She looked totally helpless and frustrated.
It choked me up.
I mean, seeing her face, you know, I'm sorry, Jack, I'm trying everything I can do.
I'm trying.
I'm so sorry.
Two fellow chem-ops were coming down the hall and they saw me standing there with my little
can, and they were laughing and pointing and one of them came up and he said, that's what
you get for making waves.
I was shocked.
I mean, there was stuff that I never knew went on.
Shirley Kyle is a farmer's wife who says she knew nothing about the weapons plant before
she was chosen to be on the special grand jury.
She's not allowed to talk about anything specific that happened in the jury room, but she found
it shocking and complex.
Yeah, it was complex.
Very complex.
And I'm sure a lot of people didn't grasp even as much as I did and there was some that
grasped.
Connie Moedeker is a suburban Denver grandmother who carries around religious medals and gives
them to people she likes.
She was on the grand jury too.
As time went on, I was more surprised of different things that were taking place and also I started
beginning to feel confused about it all.
I had the feeling that my purpose in there was to show that if this company didn't give
a darn about its workers and here's one of the workers who's telling you about these
terrible things that are going on, then they certainly don't care about the environment.
I had a feeling I was just there to rile them up and I don't even think they really believed
me.
We don't know if the grand jurors believed her or the hundred other witnesses they heard
over the next two and a half years, but in the end they did something unprecedented.
There stood jury foreman Wes McKinley in front of the federal courthouse in Denver, accusing
the prosecution and the federal government of covering up the truth about Rocky Flats.
The grand jurors still won't reveal the secrets they heard, but we've been able to piece together
some of what they learned about Rocky Flats and what led to their rebellion.
The atom bomb was born of a frantic coupling of government and civilian enterprise in World
War II, a weapon beyond most of our imaginations, and everything about it said, look away, ask
no questions.
In a race with the Soviet Union, America built nuclear weapons factories as fast as it could,
each with a specialty.
Denver was thrilled when a nearby meadow, Rocky Flats, was chosen for one of the plants.
It meant thousands of high-paying jobs.
The Atomic Energy Commission and Dow Chemical would run it.
Rocky Flats' specialty would be plutonium, the main element that destroyed Nagasaki.
The work was too important and too sensitive for outside scrutiny or ordinary regulations.
The public saw only some unrevealing government films of the plant interior and had to take
the government's word that whatever was happening inside, it was necessary and safe.
I became active in the Union in 1957.
It was pretty no-no to talk about safety.
Nobody did that.
Jim Kelly became president of the Steelworkers Union at Rocky Flats.
I was a radiation monitor on what they called the site survey team.
I kept complaining to my superiors, you can't, those drums have hot stuff from 776 Building,
which was a plutonium building.
There were thousands of drums full of oil contaminated with plutonium sitting in the
fields corroding.
Kelly says everyone at the plant knew they'd mean trouble.
A rabbit ran across the road, what is right now the central dissecting streets of the
plant.
We got him.
Got out and we caught him.
Had no idea what we were about to find, but this rabbit was what we call screaming-ass
hot.
I mean, he pegged our instruments.
Our instruments at that time, the maximum it would count, or it went off scale, was
100,000 counts a minute.
The needle went like that.
This rabbit was just hotter than a firecracker.
The wind was the first thing that went wrong at Rocky Flats.
It was supposed to blow away from Denver, but it didn't.
Some in Denver suspected the people running the plant were hiding other mistakes as well,
but it was almost two decades before a man named Edward Martel found proof of that in
1970.
Dr. Martel worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is perched
on a slope of the Rockies overlooking Rocky Flats.
Other tumors that took a little longer.
Dr. Martel is a nuclear scientist who took part in early atom bomb tests in Nevada and
the Pacific and became one of the world's leading experts on the effects of radioactive
fallout.
Well, the plant is simply six or seven miles south of here as the crow flies.
You can see a hazy outline of some of the Rocky Flats buildings now, but very hazy.
There have been very frequent fires and accidents in the plant, but we didn't hear about them
until the plant history was aired out more fully after the 69 fire.
When they couldn't hide it anymore.
When they couldn't hide it anymore, they made a remarkable number of admissions.
One news report said a metric ton of plutonium burned in the 69 fire.
Where had it gone?
Rocky Flats insisted no plutonium ash had gotten out of the building and refused to
allow outsiders to investigate.
Exasperated, Dr. Martel and a colleague tested the soil outside Rocky Flats for plutonium.
East of Rocky Flats, we found ratios that were 400 times higher than it should be if
it were from fallout alone, which means that 99.95 percent of the plutonium we found one
mile east of the plant came from Rocky Flats.
No question about it.
The government, embarrassed, finally conducted official tests.
When they checked out our measurements, East of Rocky Flats at the east fence, just outside
the east fence, they found levels ranging up to 1,500 times fallout levels.
So they simply confirmed a mile farther east it was 400 times.
So our results were confirmed.
But the plutonium contamination was not from the 1969 fire, after all.
It was from those barrels of plutonium-laced oil that Union President Kelly had warned
about.
Which corroded and broke open and leaked into the ground.
Melinda Cassin was an environmental attorney and now is part of a governor's council that
tries to keep watch on what Rocky Flats is up to.
And it turned out that they leaked about 11 curies of plutonium into the ground.
What does that mean, 11 curies?
If properly distributed it would be a lethal dose to every human being on this planet.
Winds roaring down from the Rockies had been distributing the plutonium from those corroded
barrels eastward toward Denver.
And that's the plutonium Ed Martel's soil tests had found.
The government bought up most of the contaminated land and fenced it in.
But landowners outside the fences sued, claiming Rocky Flats had contaminated their land too.
The case dragged on for ten years and uncovered more secrets.
Radioactive and hazardous waste had been incinerated for years.
And had been sprayed in nearby fields as irrigation.
And stored in barrels, which were surreptitiously and illegally buried.
Threatened with exposure about that, a plant official had suggested claiming the mound
created by the buried barrels was the work of Indians burying their dead.
But these secrets didn't get beyond the court.
The case was settled for nine million dollars with the provision that the evidence be sealed.
And there it stayed.
Public distrust of all the weapons plants was growing.
In 1975, a new agency was put in charge of the plants, the Department of Energy.
And at Rocky Flats, Dow Chemical was replaced by Rockwell International as the civilian
contractor.
But nothing seemed to change.
Rocky Flats continued to enforce the keep out signs with heavily armed security, trained
to repel terrorists.
Much of the plant was off limits even to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado
Department of Health.
They were told the plant's hazardous wastes were none of their business if they had any
nuclear ingredient.
Melinda Casson suspects it was not a matter of principle, but a necessity.
They couldn't get a permit to operate it legally.
That's true with most of the functions at Rocky Flats, and unfortunately it's true
with the weapons complex generally.
If these facilities had to get hazardous waste permits for everything that they did, they
couldn't do it.
DOE understood that, Rockwell, the operator, understood that.
That's the reason that we have these environmental battles, is because the plant can't operate
in compliance with the law.
These reports here were submitted pursuant to the 1986 agreement.
Finally, bending under public and legal pressure, the Department of Energy gave the Environmental
Protection Agency a mammoth report describing the hazardous waste at Rocky Flats and what
had been done with it.
The hieroglyphics in these notebooks translated into bad news and a lot of it.
Not easy reading.
No, no, it wasn't easy reading.
There was data about hazardous waste stored and buried and sprayed and heading toward
creeks and reservoirs and into the air from Rocky Flats.
And there was more bad news to come.
A man named Jim Stone, an engineer who'd been fired at Rocky Flats, came forward with a
frightening story about some of the buildings there, blaming his firing on his refusal to
keep quiet about it.
The duct work in building 8081, which was one of the original buildings built in 53,
and it had all the crud of the ages, a lot of radioactive material.
Stone said he alerted the contractor, Rockwell, that plutonium had accumulated in the ventilation
ducts of other buildings.
Pounds of it.
Pounds of it, yeah.
62 pounds in 71 or 707, one of them.
62 pounds when one microscopic particle could be lethal.
Oh yes.
It takes about four pounds to make a bomb.
Stone became a whistleblower.
He went to the FBI.
As luck would have it, the FBI's Denver office had an aggressive environmental specialist,
John Lipsky.
Lipsky would spend two years investigating Rocky Flats.
He won't talk about the investigation, but we know he studied all 27 volumes of the waste
report the environmental inspectors had pried out of Rocky Flats.
He took samples from the creek that runs past the plant.
He hired a helicopter pilot to take infrared pictures of the plant at night.
Lipsky thought those pictures showed hot spots that could mean radioactive or hazardous waste
was being incinerated illegally.
And he was given a confidential memo from a Department of Energy official writing to
his superiors.
Rocky Flats, the memo said, is in poor condition generally in terms of environmental compliance.
Some of our waste facilities there are patently illegal.
Here was a smoking memo, evidence that the people running Rocky Flats knew they were
breaking the law.
Lipsky drafted a 116-page affidavit describing what he knew and what he thought he could
prove if he could get into the plant.
It turned out to be the perfect time for Agent Lipsky to get action, 1989.
The new president had declared himself the environmental president and appointed a fire-breathing
secretary of energy named James Watkins who promised to clean up the weapons plants.
President Bush told me on the 11th of January, 1989, that he had a mess in the Department
of Energy facilities.
Will you clean up a mess?
And I said, well, because you're a friend, because you asked me personally, I'll do it.
But let me tell you, it's a task.
Bush also appointed a very ambitious new U.S. attorney in Denver, Mike Norton.
Norton and FBI Agent Lipsky prepared for Operation Desert Glow.
On the morning of June 6, 1989, federal agents wearing blue coveralls raided the Rocky Flats
nuclear weapons plant.
At about 9 a.m. today, approximately 75 agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Criminal Investigations, assisted by representatives
of the Department of Energy's Inspector General, began the execution of a federal criminal
search warrant at the United States Department of Energy's Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant
near Denver, Colorado.
Here was something brand new.
One government agency raiding another, the government raiding itself.
When the FBI left Rocky Flats nine days later, it had 960 boxes of evidence, three and a
half million pages of documents.
U.S. Attorney Norton said it would take a special grand jury to get to the bottom of
it all.
The grand jury turned out to be more special than Norton had in mind.
It began on a promising note.
Federal Judge Sherman Feinsilver, seen here swearing in new U.S. citizens, made the grand
jurors feel very important.
In essence, he told our grand jury, as his predecessors had told other grand juries,
that we had the responsibility to act in the best interest of the people of the state of
Colorado, and that we should act independent of him, we should act independent of the FBI,
and we should act independent of the prosecutors.
The grand jury would hear complicated testimony about some very strange alleged crimes.
Pond Creek, for instance.
Rockwell had mixed radioactive and hazardous sludge with cement and made thousands of gigantic
blocks of it so it could be stored and shipped.
But it didn't work.
Many of the concrete blocks became mushy.
The waste leaked onto the ground, where it could drain into a creek.
Frontline obtained a confidential investigator's report that documents how the managers of
Rockwell knew the Pond Creek was a serious environmental hazard, but did nothing about
it.
The grand jurors also saw pictures and heard testimony that Rockwell was disposing of hazardous
waste by spraying it nonstop, even in the winter, into the fields, calling it irrigation.
Many times, what the ground could absorb, resulting in sheet runoff downstream to municipal
water supplies.
Complicated as it was, the grand jurors began to understand the evidence.
I know from the evidence and what I heard that there were some people that should have
been indicted.
I think they should have been indicted.
But in Washington, they saw things differently.
Attorney General Richard Thornburg had approved of the FBI raid on Rocky Flats.
But now it appeared the Justice Department realized their country cousins in Colorado
had gotten them into a deeper trough of truth than Beltway politics permits.
Executives of Rockwell International, one of the government's most important contractors,
were about to be put on trial.
Unlike most federal prosecutions, environmental crimes are routed through Washington, where
higher-ups in the Justice Department must okay everything that's done.
Assistant Attorney General Barry Hartman had charge of the Rocky Flats case.
We were concerned about a lot of things with the case.
We wanted to make sure that this case was going to ultimately be won if it was going
to be brought.
That's for sure.
We wanted to make sure that we weren't sacrificing larger policy issues.
One of Washington's concerns was that Rockwell's lawyers were playing hardball.
Prosecute Rockwell, they warned, and will prove Rockwell's employees were merely following
orders from the Department of Energy, your client.
I know, and I don't think there's any mystery, Rockwell said at several points that their
intention in terms of building a defense was to put DOE on trial.
Denver's U.S. Attorney Norton insists he was running the prosecution, not Washington.
But his assistant, who was actually presenting the case to the grand jury, wrote a memo saying
he didn't think Washington had enough fire in the belly.
And Norton himself saw that.
Early on, people in Washington, they actually thought less of the case than we did.
What were they doing in Washington, D.C.?
Okay.
So that's where their orders were coming from.
Evidently, I don't really know.
It's all confusing, and I wish it could be simple.
But it wasn't simple.
While the grand jurors were planning indictments, the prosecutors and Rockwell were planning
a deal.
On December 9, 1990, the prosecution team met in Washington to review the case.
Rockwell had offered to pay a million-dollar fine in exchange for no indictments against
its employees.
Over the next six months, the two sides haggled over money.
U.S. Attorney Norton said 52 million.
Rockwell countered with 10 if the prosecution would make a statement saying the crimes had
caused no threat to public safety and no environmental damage.
In Denver, FBI Agent Lipsky was told to stop collecting evidence against individuals.
The grand jurors knew none of this.
Did something go wrong between the prosecutors and the grand jurors?
It fell apart.
That point occurred whenever the grand jury started looking at some directions, wrongdoings
that they felt may be investigated.
Within the prosecution seemed to have abandoned us at that point.
We weren't allowed to do anything.
We were told to go home.
It was in March of 1992, and we were to meet for the last time.
And Mike Norton told us that a plea bargain had been reached.
Suddenly it was over.
A plea bargain.
Rockwell pleaded guilty to 10 environmental crimes from 1987 to 1989 and agreed to pay
an $18.5 million fine.
About the same amount the company had collected in bonuses during that period.
Rockwell's attorney refused to talk about it, and the company has maintained that silence
ever since.
The plea agreement said the crimes had caused no dangerous contamination outside the plant.
And after all the commotion, the sensational raid, the years of investigation, no individuals
were indicted.
I was sick.
I was really disappointed.
I think there was a multitude of emotions, which ranged from people who laughed, thought
it was a joke, you know, April Fools or something like this, to people who realized and appreciated
it, it was not a joke, and were outraged.
But they could not express their anger or talk about what they knew at all.
The case was closed.
Then an extraordinary thing happened.
A story appeared in a weekly newspaper in Denver, saying the grand jury had written
up indictments of five Rockwell employees and three employees of the Department of Energy.
But the prosecutor and judge had blocked them.
The reporter, Brian Abbas, says twelve unnamed jurors were so frustrated with the plea bargain,
they had risked prosecution for contempt of court to talk to him.
These jurors are not naive about what they did in talking to me.
They understood that they violated their oath.
They understood that if they're ever caught, it's proved who talked, that they have certain
legal consequences to pay for that.
Though he denies it, the prosecutors suspect lawyer Ken Peck of being the ringleader of
the grand jury rebellion.
They learned that Peck had once actively opposed a plan to incinerate waste at Rocky Flats
and had not told the court about that possible conflict when he was chosen as a juror.
The jurors did go up into Peck's office late at night and write a report after the
prosecutor had told him to go home and not do a report.
The judge, whose instructions had said they could write one, ordered the report sealed.
But someone gave it to reporter Abbas.
It omits names and most other details, but it calls the Department of Energy and Rockwell
indistinguishable co-conspirators, who engaged in a continuing campaign of distraction, deception,
and dishonesty.
Rocky Flats is an ongoing criminal enterprise, the jury said, and should be closed.
And it didn't come from a government agency.
It didn't even come from a collection of lawyers or scientists.
It came from citizens, ordinary citizens, a school teacher, a bartender, a bus driver,
a retired sheriff, a rancher.
They're not prosecutors.
They're laypeople who did a great job and who probably thought there was enough evidence
to indict.
But enough evidence to indict, and in addition, the evidence that a grand jury sees is not
necessarily evidence that's admissible in court.
The prosecutors say they got almost no information from the plant's employees.
Rockwell had found a way to orchestrate the familiar silence of Rocky Flats.
Even after its removal as civilian contractor, Rockwell provided employees with attorneys
who coached them and attended their interviews with investigators.
The prosecutors say they couldn't pierce this defense enough even to find a chain of command
at Rocky Flats.
There were no high-level individuals to whom criminal conduct could be attributed.
What we found instead was that what we called a DOE culture or mentality that had prevailed,
which elevated production of nuclear materials above concern for environmental compliance.
Did all of you agree about that?
Yes, without exception, the conclusions we reached were unanimous among the prosecutors
and the investigators.
Maybe not.
Behind closed doors, FBI agent Lipsky told a congressional subcommittee that when he
learned of the plea agreement, he became physically ill, and that Norton's lead prosecutor in
the case had said he thought there was enough evidence to indict individuals, but he was
outboated.
How can you have crimes but no criminals?
We did have a criminal.
The criminal was the company in this case.
Company can't go to jail.
That's true, but there are many cases when you don't have enough evidence.
In an area like this, as I said before, you may have a crime but not have enough evidence
to convict a particular individual.
In any large organization, you have individuals who each may know.
Out on the Colorado prairie, that sort of reasoning doesn't make sense.
Cowboy grand juror Wes McKinley sees the Rocky Flats matter in more down-to-earth terms.
If there has been a crime, somebody should be held accountable.
The grand jurors could find individuals to indict and could find the chain of command.
Why couldn't the prosecutors?
The judge's instructions told us we were to use our own judgment without fear, favor,
or criticism of the court, the public, or the prosecutors.
Still bound by the grand jury rules of secrecy, Wes McKinley can only talk about the Rocky
Flats case obliquely.
I can't tell what it was, but I got the feeling that there were factors that were outside
of what we were doing that motivated this.
And that's why they wanted us to leave without finishing the job that we were sworn to do.
President Howard Wolpe was chairman of the congressional subcommittee that looked into
the way the Rocky Flats case was settled.
It's outrageous.
Basically, the Department of Justice wrote into this plea bargain every one of Rockwell's
essential conditions.
What our investigation revealed is that there really is no accountability in government.
And if you have people justifying individual behavior on the grounds that the culture of
the agency sanctions that behavior, basically you have no way of changing the behavior or
of holding individuals accountable for illegal activity.
Can you reform it?
Can you create a new culture without holding individuals accountable?
No, you cannot.
Even former Energy Secretary Watkins, though he won't say there should have been indictments,
agrees with part of the grand jury's message.
I agree with the concept that fixing accountability and responsibility on all of these issues
is critical to good government.
And we had lousy government working this Department of Energy for too long.
One phrase above everything else in the grand jury's clandestine report gets the prosecution's
goat.
One calling Rocky Flats an ongoing criminal enterprise.
The prosecution insists the crimes are over with.
The true story is that, yeah, there were serious problems.
They've been addressed.
They're not problems currently.
How are things at Rocky Flats today?
Oil has been replaced by a new contractor, EG&G, and the Department of Energy is supposed
to have turned over a new leaf.
The Cold War is over.
The plant isn't making bomb parts anymore.
Everyone's talking about cleanup and dismantling, and the government keeps insisting the public
is safe.
Benny Abbott has raised miniature donkeys and horses next door to Rocky Flats for 33
years.
It was near here that Ed Martell took his soil samples 20 years ago and found them heavy
with plutonium.
Once Rocky Flats is cleaned up, a sports complex and golf course may go here.
Benny knows that mysterious waste which seeped underground at Rocky Flats has spread her
way, but she's not about to leave.
She plans for her children to take over here when she dies.
You've had some unusual things happen to animals, haven't you?
Yes we have, but we don't know the causes of them.
So as I say, I don't want to be damning something when I don't know the cause, but we have had
some definite peculiarities, and that's kind of all I want to say about that.
Does it seem as though there have been more than you might expect?
Yes.
Even as people wonder about the dangers of Rocky Flats, they keep moving closer to it.
For three years, Benny and others who live near Rocky Flats have been attending meetings
to hear about studies into what the weapons plant has done to the environment.
The studies are directed by the Colorado Department of Health, but are paid for by the Department
of Energy.
Last week, the Health Department released a preliminary report on the studies.
It indicates the plutonium that escaped from the plant may not be the problem the neighbors
feared.
We would like to know what's in our backyards, and we have never been able to find out.
While further studies depend on information that's still classified, the preliminary
report reflected soil samples that found plutonium well below the danger level.
But no one really knows how dangerous plutonium is.
Plutonium standards have been set by groups of scientists, most of whom work for the nuclear
establishment, and they have fluctuated, sometimes conveniently.
Twenty years ago, for instance, when suburban Denver lawns tested in the danger zone, the
Colorado Department of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission met and simply raised the
safety limits by ten times.
We haven't seen anything that shows a significant danger to the public.
The Colorado Health Department team, now assigned to measure the contamination, works with the
standards it inherited.
Could you build homes in this area?
There aren't any homes being built in those areas.
I know, but, well, I'm just trying to get, see, I'm frustrated here, trying to find
out what is dangerous.
Where does plutonium contamination in the soil become dangerous?
And to whom?
In a sense, you're asking the question, how clean is clean enough, or how dirty is dangerous?
And again, that's a question that has...
Let me put it in these terms, life-threatening.
And you're saying that it's well below too much, the standard, the levels of contamination
by plutonium out there are well within safety limits.
Well, zero is desirable, more than zero is less than desirable.
When does it become dangerous, at two, 2.0?
With regard to the plutonium workers, we found elevated risks for leukemia and the lymphopoietic
cancers.
In the early 80s, epidemiologist Greg Wilkinson, working for the Department of Energy, found
that statistically, too many Rocky Flats workers had died of certain types of cancer.
When management and the Department of Energy, certain folks in the Department of Energy
became aware of our findings, they got rather upset and attempted to make it difficult for
us to get those findings published.
And in the decades since, Wilkinson says, the DOE has not allowed another such study
of plutonium workers anywhere.
Hoping to find out how the government decides what are safe and unsafe levels of plutonium
contamination, we went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to find the man who's probably most responsible
for setting the original standards, Dr. Carl Morgan.
Known as the father of health physics.
Well, in the very early period when I came to Oak Ridge, in September of 1943, there
were no standards.
Initially, the standards that I set here at the laboratory for plutonium were based on
these studies of three rats.
In the years since, Morgan has come to believe he was wrong, that much smaller amounts of
plutonium can cause cancer.
We found that the present levels were at least 500 times too high.
When he began to testify against his own standards, Dr. Morgan says he was removed from the organizations
that set them.
They decided I'd been on the International Commission and the National Council long enough,
so I was made.
Ed Martell has sounded the same warnings as Carl Morgan, and says he too was ostracized.
So long as the DOE and the nuclear industry control the plutonium and pay the scientists
who study it, Martell suggests, we won't get the truth.
It's a conspiracy of sorts.
It's not just ignorance and wishful thinking.
A conspiracy.
It's a conspiracy of such a nature that if Carl Morgan and I and a few others that think
that plutonium standards are not conservative by factors of a hundred or a thousand, if
we're right, then their suppressing information and research on such possibilities is a crime
against humanity.
This is the primary entrance point for all employees, vehicles, etc.
After weeks of asking, we finally got to take a tour of Rocky Flats, sort of.
Two public relations representatives accompanied us, one from the Department of Energy and
one from the new contractor, EG&G.
Rocky Flats has quadrupled its public relations force since the FBI raid, part of the new
culture of cooperation with the public.
We didn't get to go into any buildings, but we did get to see some of the things we'd
been hearing and reading about.
This is the most notorious spot of all, the 903 pad.
Everything has a number at Rocky Flats.
How thick is that?
Do you know?
I think it's about 12 inches.
I can find out for you.
This is what became of all the oil contaminated with plutonium that leaked out of thousands
of corroded barrels, enough plutonium to kill everyone on earth.
They buried it here and put a thick layer of asphalt over it.
I can't help feeling a little uneasy standing here.
It's a good thing the public relations people were along to reassure us.
I don't feel at risk here.
I've worked here for three and a half years.
Still there was that story about the hot rabbit.
True, that was 20 years ago, but plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years.
Our next stop was the 881 hillside.
No one knows exactly what was dumped here or how much.
When we did our assessments, there were reports of people that had taken things out of the
back door of 881 in the late 50s and just dumped them.
Now, that was, you know, it may have been a thing of water, it may have been a fan of
solvent.
It was pretty common practice.
Down below is the creek that fed the drinking water of several towns.
And we got to see the Pond Crete, the debacle the DOE couldn't deny and wouldn't deal
with, the attempt to get rid of radioactive sludge by encasing it in cement that collapsed.
It's been reprocessed or repackaged and is no longer leaking, but it still looks unworthy
of scientists, and still no one knows what to do with it.
They wouldn't let us go into the hot side, the fortress within the fortress where the
bomb triggers were made, even though all production at Rocky Flats has been shut down.
The problem is in the prep time.
It's difficult to explain why can't you get in there.
It's not because it's dangerous to be in there.
We may be able to get in there.
You probably could.
We applied to get into the hot side, waited several weeks, they said no.
So we didn't get to see where Jackie Breaver was contaminated, and we didn't get to see
the ventilation system that had 62 pounds of plutonium in it that no one knew about.
A lot of it's still there that no one knows what to do with.
And of course we didn't get to see the vaults of pure plutonium, hundreds of tons of it,
some sources say.
We asked the Colorado Department of Health about those buildings.
In effect, you don't really know what's inside some of those buildings.
Is that fair to say?
There are certain materials they deal with out there, classified materials that we have
no need to know what's in those buildings.
You have no need to know this?
No need to know for some of the classified materials they have in there that are materials
that they manage and process and that sort of thing.
The Department of Energy will have to take care of that.
That's correct, that's correct.
These environmental problems were caused by the same people who are now in charge of cleaning
it up, supposedly.
Peter Johnson and Amelia Govan, who are congressional advisors on technical issues, doubt that the
Department of Energy and its partners, the contractors, have reformed.
Even when new leaders come in to the Department of Energy and say, there shall be a new culture,
there shall be openness, the public will be let in, it's very difficult to get that message
down to each of the sites and to the contractors who have been running these sites over the
past years.
Rocky Flats is not alone.
There are all the other buildings and all the other nuclear weapons plants dotting the
country, 2,700 buildings.
There are buildings, huge buildings, that are totally contaminated and nobody has even
begun to estimate how much it will cost to clean up those buildings.
There is no process yet in place for deciding what to do with those buildings.
Say you've got an office pool and you have to pick a final number, the final cost for
this cleanup, I'd like to hear your bets.
Well we could easily spend half a trillion.
At the end of the tour, we got to see the fields where they sprayed hazardous waste
year after year, sprayed them far beyond saturation, calling it irrigation.
No one knows how much of it or where it all went.
There isn't much to see now, like a battleground long after the battle.
After all the secrecy, it turns out no one knows what's here or what it may do.
That's some secret.
Of all the nuclear weapons plants, we know most about the problems of Rocky Flats because
of the grand jury that got mad.
Some of the jurors say they have more to tell, if they could.
Do you think it would be important for us to know what you know?
I think it would.
I think it would be in your best interest.
Connie Moedeker and Shirley Kyle became fast friends during their two and a half years
on the grand jury.
At the end of it all, there was one final bizarre twist.
The judge in the Rocky Flats case has asked for a federal investigation of his own grand
jury for talking.
So the tragic turn about, this did turn out to be, I'm very sad, we were there to do
our duty, and now we're being prosecuted for coming forward and wanting the citizens
to know what they need to know, should know, and have the right to know?
Does that make sense to you?
Connie Moedeker recently moved.
She has just discovered that, despite all her misgivings about Rocky Flats, she has
moved to within sight of it.
I can't believe you got this close to it, Connie.
How far can you run?
Where can you go?
You can't.
Not in this area.
You get over there.
I feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.
I have my day.
I have, and I am disabled, and I have learned to compensate.
I know that...
Jackie Breiver sued Rockwell and several of its employees for harassment, intimidation,
and assault, convinced her plutonium contamination from the leaking safety glove was intentional.
In August 1992, a federal judge dismissed the case for lack of evidence.
She has been unable to find employment or medical insurance.
But I have some things on my wish list, and that is, I want a congressional investigation,
a real one, a real investigation in front of God and everybody.
Let's all tell the truth.
I want that.
No more congressional hearings on the Rocky Flats case are planned.
Next week, the Energy Department will finally begin releasing some classified information
about Rocky Flats, including an inventory of leftover plutonium, more than 28,000 pounds
of it.
But the full truth about Rocky Flats may be buried forever, buried in the fields of waste,
and eventually buried with those who made the bombs.
Here's what we can find.
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