Rocky Flats: The bait-and-switch cleanup

[acmavm]

http://www.thebulletin.org/print.php?art_ofn=jf05moore

Energy's version of a cleanup at Rocky Flats hasn't measured up to local demands. But it's the neighbors who have to live with the consequences.

By LeRoy Moore
January/February 2005 pp. 50-57 (vol. 61, no. 1) © 2005 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

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After the Rocky Flats nuclear facility cleanup is complete, most of the 6,500-acre site, located 16 miles from downtown Denver, will be handed over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to be maintained as a National Wildlife Refuge. Had the site been designated for future use as housing, farmland, or even park land, the cleanup would be more thorough--and more expensive. The "wildlife refuge" designation provides the excuse for a cheaper cleanup, but will it make for a safe cleanup, especially in the long term?

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What the public said
There are a number of issues involved in turning a contaminated nuclear weapons production site into a wildlife refuge. While it seems wise to maintain federal control of the site, the Fish and Wildlife Service has no guidelines for managing the Superfund sites it is now inheriting. Setting aside Rocky Flats as open space is certainly preferable to opening it for development. But designating Rocky Flats as a wildlife refuge to avoid performing the best possible cleanup seems reckless. In the case of Rocky Flats, it also violates the public's will.

In 1994, the Rocky Flats Local Impacts Initiative, an Energy-funded advisory body, created the broadly representative Rocky Flats Future Site Use Working Group for the sole purpose of telling Energy what the local community wanted at Rocky Flats. In June 1995, the group recommended, by consensus, that the site be cleaned up so that only background levels of radiation remain. Mindful that the technology to attain this goal was not yet available, the group called for ongoing research to develop the requisite technology and for the creation of a trust fund to ensure coverage of the cleanup cost. "We are willing to wait as long as is necessary," the group said, "but no longer than necessary, to see the site cleaned up, even if it takes generations to accomplish. When the technology allows cleanup to average background levels for Colorado in a cost-effective and environmentally sensitive manner, then cleanup should be done to this level." <2>

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Because the price of the cleanup and closure had been fixed, the plan mandated by the revised RFCA had to be done for no more than would have been spent under the original 1996 RFCA. Energy, Kaiser-Hill, and the regulators had to decide how they could provide the cleanup the public wanted without spending more. They came up with a trade-off. Their plan proposed a better surface cleanup in exchange for a less thorough subsurface cleanup. Kaiser-Hill would clean the surface enough to protect a wildlife refuge worker and put controls in place to contain the contamination left below the surface. This, the heart of the revised RFCA, could be done for the same sum as the rejected 1996 plan.

The revised RFCA allows a concentration of 50 picocuries of plutonium per gram of soil to remain in the top 3 feet of soil. At a depth of 3 to 6 feet, the level is allowed to rise to 1,000 picocuries per gram, though as much as 6,000 picocuries may be left in small areas of contamination. Below 6 feet, there is no limit on how much plutonium is allowed to remain. As a result of leaving the ground contaminated to these levels, future generations might someday face further remediation costs. It is impossible to assess the potential near-and long-term effects of these contamination levels on people, plants, and animals.

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[WildClarySage]

1. Sounds like the setting for a cheesy Sci-Fi Channel made for TV movie.

[NNadir]

2. I don't think this is particularly catastrophic.

I would certainly like to take my children there some day to see if we could detect plutonium with an ordinary geiger counter. We man not be able to do so. 50 picocuries per gram means only lightly less than two decays per second per gram. It might prove easy to miss that much. It would be interesting to locate areas with 6000 picocuries which would have a count of 222 decays per second or six nanocuries. That just might be enough to make the geiger counter come alive.

At Chernobyl, Plutonium as proved one of the least problematic nuclides distributed in the foodchain or environment. Being of low solubility, It more or less just sits there.