Two years ago, the federal government signed a pact with the state of Colorado and communities near Rocky Flats, promising that the U.S. Department of Energy would cleanse the former nuclear site to safe and specific standards.
Now, just weeks before the DOE hoped to declare the facility officially closed, a subcontractor has found more than a dozen spots where soil contamination exceeds the cleanup agreement. The DOE should have mopped up the mess immediately. Instead, bureaucrats quibbled over whether to take any action.
Rocky Flats assembled plutonium triggers for atomic bombs until 1992. In 1996, the federal, state and local governments signed the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement. The deal was updated in 2003 to detail how much radioactive contamination could be left in the soils. Now the DOE appears trying to wiggle out of its commitment.
One of the most contaminated parts of Rocky Flats was the “903 pad,” where decades ago radioactive wastes were stored outdoors in barrels that eventually leaked. The DOE and its current contractor, Kaiser-Hill, claimed they cleansed the surrounding soils, but Kaiser-Hill hired Tennessee-based Oak Ridge Institute of Science and Education to double check. The institute found 13 spots where radiation levels do not meet agreed-upon levels. For example, the 2003 pact says soils should not have more radioactivity than 50 picocuries per gram, but one spot registered 400. Health experts are studying whether the hot spots are a health risk.
U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard said bluntly that the discovery of the hot spots “raises several concerns, the foremost being whether the site has been sufficiently cleaned up.”
Yet the DOE downplays the finding. “Do we want to chase these little hot spots?” a spokesman asked rhetorically. The answer is yes – otherwise the DOE would violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the cleanup deal and no one will trust the safety of the site.
The DOE’s equivocation doesn’t bode well for what will happen once the site is declared “closed,” which was slated to happen in October. (Indeed, it’s reasonable to ask if the department is so anxious to close Rocky Flats that it’s cutting corners.) The cleanup pact says the agency will monitor the site after closure, but it makes no sense to monitor for trouble if the DOE doesn’t intend to fix any problems it finds.
Allard asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the Rocky Flats cleanup will achieve an adequate level of public health protection. That GAO inquiry now takes on new importance.
