This book by Len Ackland is researched well, and I recommend it as one book to read about the Rocky Flats plant that produced components for nuclear weapons in Colorado. The title gives away the fact that Mr. Ackland’s point of view differs from the views I presented in my book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban Myths debunked.” However, in several instances of where common subjects are discussed, factual information in the two books is often virtually identical. I give Mr. Ackland credit for his extensive discussion of the history of the area and the Church family, which is not included in my book. I intend to restrict myself to doing a non-editorializing review in this first part of the review. The part of the review is about homesteading in the Rocky Flats area by the Church family in 1861, development of the area, and the “taking” of some of the Church land for the construction of a new nuclear weapons production plant. The second half will be about the operation of Rocky Flats, accidents, legal actions, and controversies. I will post a blog after that review discussing some points of disagreement I have with what is in the book.
The history of the Church family is nicely woven into the book, and the first chapter gives a well-written description of when George Henry Church and Sarah (Miller) Church beginning with when they arrived in Colorado in 1861 “…seeking adventure and gold.” Striking it rich with gold didn’t work out, and the couple eventually settled down to farm and raise cattle. Henry built a system of ditches and reservoirs to provide water to the enterprises, and that was a significant contribution to the settlement and development of the entire area. Homesteaders were subsidized by the federal government, “But that reality wouldn’t make the government’s later taking of Rocky Flats land go down any easier for the Churches.” The government offered $18 an acre but paid several times that figure after Marcus Church rejected the first offer and took legal action.
The second chapter details the influence of U.S. Senator Edwin Johnson , or “Big Ed,” of Colorado in the selection of a Colorado location for “Project Apple,” which was the name given to the effort to select a location for the new nuclear weapons plant that would eventually adopted the name “Rocky Flats.” He formed a bipartisan team with Eugene Milliken, and the two of them together were able to influence the location of several military facilities in Colorado. The first was the Rocky Mountain Arsenal followed by the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) and the Air Force Academy. Both senators were on the Congressional Atomic Energy Committee and were strong supporters of anything that would be advantageous to U.S. uranium mining. Johnson was chairman of the Senate’s Military Affairs Committee by the end of World War II. Milliken helped draft the Atomic Energy Act that formed the cornerstone of U.S. nuclear policy. The Atomic Energy Commission was busy in the late 1940s demanding increasing numbers of nuclear weapons. They identified seventy Soviet targets requiring 133 atomic bombs. The military contended that “…scheduled bomb production should be substantially increased and extended,” and that they needed more than 133 nuclear weapons. The military had identified 5,000 to 6,000 “…prospective Soviet nuclear targets…” by the time construction had begun at Rocky Flats.
The Chamber of Commerce of Alamosa Colorado contacted Johnson and Milliken to enlist their support for building a planned tritium and plutonium production plant near their town. Durango also wanted the plant, and the senators were in a bind. Johnson warned that the plant would become the number one target for the Soviets, and that there might be huge risks from accidents involving the reactors. It was determined that the plant would be built in South Carolina, and it was named the “Savannah River” plant. Johnson did not believe facility that would be built at Rocky Flats would be as dangerous as the nuclear reactors that would be installed at Savannah River. The book doesn’t directly attribute the selection of Rocky Flats to Johnson and Milliken, but it strongly infers they played a role in that selection. “Rocky Flats would be the next big federal apple they would pick, but the two senators wouldn’t brag so openly about it.” It is also observed that Johnson and Milliken didn’t have to lobby for the site, because “everything pointed to Colorado being the best choice,” and with both Colorado senators being on the congressional committee “the AEC couldn’t go wrong by choosing this state.” “As long as they didn’t oppose it, the new plant was theirs.”The Denver Post headline March 23, 1951 was “There’s Good News Today: U.S. to Build $45 million A-Plant near Denver.” The Rocky Mountain News reported a “…top secret atomic production plant will be constructed in the Rocky Flats area northwest of Denver.” Dow Chemical Company was announced to have been selected to operate Project Apple. As to comments about the safety of the new facility, staffers for the congressional committee wrote “…it would be perfectly safe on the 16th Street here in Washington.” One requirement for selecting the site had been for the surrounding area to be desirable to future workers and to provide areas with adequate housing opportunities. One subsection of the Chapter Three is titled, “Isolation, but Housing too.”
The author writes that even though the AEC wanted Denver for the project Apple site, they went through the motions of an open selection process. The Austin Company looked at “…twenty-one locations in seven states. A key requirement was low humidity (because the expected processes required low humidity), and the Colorado locations were the only ones to meet that requirement. Denver was quickly selected over Pueblo and Colorado Springs. Rocky Flats was said to have been selected because it was downwind of any densely populated areas and that the Stapleton airport wind data had been used to make that observation. Use of actual wind data for the Rocky Flats location “…should have eliminated Rocky Flats as a potential nuclear weapons plant site.”
The Church family would be approached in 1972 after AEC decided to buy 4,450 acres around Rocky Flats for a “buffer zone,” and 1,450 acres were Church Ranch property. They were paid $2,869 per acre, or $4.16 million for their land. Perhaps that wasn’t the biggest impact to the Church’s from government actions that year. A new state law required to submit an evaluation of potential radiation hazards in land they intended to develop, and the Colorado Department of Health adopted a provisional standard of 0.2 disintegrations per minute per gram of soil, which imposed “…a virtual moratorium on development in the area east of Rocky Flats (because of contamination from the 903 pad and the 1957 fire). The health department eventually settled on a level ten times higher than the provisional standard. In 1975 Marcus Church submitted a formal claim against the new U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) that had succeeded AEC. He demanded $19.9 million in damages, charging that the federal government had negligently contaminated the family’s land and water. Marcus Church was deceased by the time the suit was settled out of court, but the family received $6.8 million of the $9 million settlement.