Jim Stone, whose whistle-blowing efforts at Rocky Flats led to the plant’s closure, died Wednesday at the Julia Temple Center in Englewood. He was 82.
A service time has not been set.
An engineer, Stone helped to build Rocky Flats, a plant west of Denver that made nuclear triggers, and later was employed as a troubleshooter for the plant, said his attorney, Hartley Alley of Denver.
When Stone found what he believed were radioactive hazardous-waste violations, he was told by plant operator Rockwell International not to tell the Department of Energy, Alley said.
Ultimately he took the information to the FBI and was “the driving force behind the agency’s raid of the plant” in 1987, according to The Denver Post.
Rockwell pleaded guilty to 10 environmental crimes and paid $18.5 million in fines.
Later, $4.2 million in civil penalties were assessed against Rockwell. Stone’s efforts to get some of that money were denied last month by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We had won every step of the way, until the Supreme Court,” Alley said.
Stone, who lived in Lakewood, suffered from dementia and Alzheimer’s in his last years, said his son, Bob Stone of Lakewood.
“By the time he died, he didn’t even remember who Rockwell was,” Bob Stone said.
Even though “he never got a nickel, he was, oddly, never bitter,” Bob Stone said of his father’s 18-year court battle.
James Stone was born Aug. 9, 1924, in St. Louis. He and his brother and sister were put in an orphanage because their parents couldn’t afford a family, Bob Stone said.
One of his first jobs was “swabbing out old barges in the summer on the Mississippi,” Bob Stone said.
Jim Stone took engineering classes and got a job working with the military in Point Barrow, Alaska.
On March 4, 1947, he married Virginia Gilbert, a Coloradan, and they honeymooned in Point Barrow.
Stone had other jobs, including helping to lay a pipeline in Greenland and several heating and air conditioning jobs, including at the Brown Palace Hotel and Daniels and Fisher tower.
He started at Rocky Flats in 1980, and when he found the environmental violations, “all he wanted was to solve the problems and clean things up,” his son said.
He told Rockwell there was plutonium missing, pressure valves that didn’t work and problems with the beryllium.
Rockwell had a waste-disposal system, but it ultimately didn’t work, as Stone had predicted. Water and soil were contaminated.
Rockwell officials got so tired of hearing from him that they laid him off in 1984, which “ultimately ruined his career,” Alley said.
In addition to his wife and son, Stone is survived by another son, Randy, of Wheat Ridge; five grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com.
