An extensive fire in 1969 at the Rocky Flats Plant attracted significant attention and led to information that a previous fire in 1957 and an outside storage area called the “903 pad” had released plutonium contamination. I discuss in the book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (available on this web site, Amazon, and Createspace) that the reputation of the site never recovered from the negative publicity. However, it is apparently not well remembered that the voters of Colorado had an opportunity to express their opinion about whether the plant should remain in operation. As I wrote at the end of Chapter 11 of the book, there was a ballot issue in 1982 to end operations at the plant. The exact wording was, “Shall the constitution of the State of Colorado be amended in order to bring about cessation of nuclear weapons component production in Colorado…” The vote was defeated 584,356 to 326,550. The source of this information is an article published in the Rocky Mountain News November 4, 1982.

At least one person who followed the history of Rocky Flats closely mentioned they weren’t familiar with the vote on the amendment, and I decided I needed to look for additional verification. I was able to locate a reference on ballotpedia.org, which listed all the ballots issues for 1982. Proposition 6 was the measure that would have made it illegal to produce components for nuclear weapons at Rocky Flats. It did not specify which components were included, so production of stainless and other non-nuclear components would have been just as illegal as those made from plutonium.

Regardless of why the proposal was defeated, I suggested in my book that the proposal might have had a different fate if the vote had been held in the late 1980s. Negative stories about Rocky Flats in 1988 won the site the dubious honor of being the top news story for that year. Of course the raid in 1989 might also have swung a few (or many) votes.

I mentioned in the Rocky Flats Book, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban Myths Debunked,” that I could find no evidence to support the continuing belief by some that Rocky Flats was conducting illegal “midnight burning” in the Building 771 incinerator as had been alleged in the search warrant authorizing the FBI and EPA raid in 1989. I agreed with the expert who informed the Justice Department he expected that the heat trace detected by the spy plane flyovers in 1988 was caused by the building heating system and not the incinerator.

I continue to search the archives of the Rocky Flats Museum, and found two documents that support what I wrote. The first is the Emission Permit issued by the Colorado Department of Health on August 28, 1985 that allowed the incinerator to operate legally. The permit describes the, “Multiple chamber retort type incinerator designed to burn radioactive contaminated plastics, paper, rubber, cloth, etc. at a charge rate of 49 lbs./hour (with) emissions…controlled by potassium hydroxide scrubber and HEPA filtration.”

Another document from the archives was an Envision article dated October 9, 2002, titled “Disposing of glovebox tied to FBI raid.” The article doesn’t explain that steam cleaning was used to clean gloveboxes for the December inventory of nuclear material, but it does refer to the operation. “The 1988 image of the heat plume depicted B771’s exhaust, which was probably warmed by steam-cleaning operations, but on a December night was significantly warmer than ambient air regardless of building operations. Up to 250,000 cubic feet of air is exhausted through B771’s stack as part of a system to maintain negative differential pressure…” “Incineration does not increase the temperature of stack exhaust significantly, if at all. Processing the incinerator off-gases through two heat exchangers was very effective at cooling them.” Another part of the article said in addition to the two heat exchangers, “The gases entered a spray chamber and were sprayed with potassium hydroxide to neutralize them and knock out fly ash. The gases then passed through a series of high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters in the incinerator filter plenum before being released through the stack.” In summary, what the spy plane saw had nothing to do with incineration.

I also mentioned in the book that one of the people who informed the investigators about suspicions of illegal activities that were listed in the search warrant was the EPA enforcement person assigned to Rocky Flats. (I wonder whether the information was in the form of an affidavit.) I mentioned that person was no fan of Rocky Flats. I located an award given to that person in the archives. It is titled, “ROCKY FLATS RADICAL, Protestor Award.” The certificate explains that the award was given “In appreciation for generous commitment, environmental spirit, and outspoken talent in fighting Rocky Flats contamination and challenging bureaucratic rhetoric in order to shut down this immoral facility that irradiates our community with carcinogenic radionuclides.” It then adds the “Rocky Flats Radical Protestor (was) Dedicated to protect citizens who are tired of being a nuclear-guinea-pig living in a radioactive fallout zone, forced by bureaucrats to drink and breathe nuclear waste. It doesn’t take much interpretation to see how fairly Rocky Flats was treated by this government employee.

Part I of this blog discussed comments from a senior DOE official who read the book, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats” (which you can order at either CreateSpace.com or Amazon.com) about Soviet-funded international anti-nuclear organizations and changing public opinion about acceptable risk. I need to first address a response to the first post from the person who made the original comments. I skipped lightly over the issue of the lawsuits about hazardous waste laws, and thank goodness for people willing to set me straight! Here is a new comment about that issue. “DOE was not just being obstinate in fighting against coverage by these laws. The laws themselves specifically exempted DOE nuclear facilities…facilities like Rocky flats were directed to not comply…The wrinkle in the court case was in applying RCRA for the hazardous components of otherwise radioactive nuclear wastes, even if the hazardous component was very small compared to the radioactive component.”

Putting that issue aside, this posting is primarily about how Congress was influenced by the growing and vocal anti-nuclear movement to pass a new law that created massive impact on the ability of sites such as Rocky Flats to perform the duties assigned by Congress. As an occasional Libertarian I feel compelled to mention this is a classic example of how the government can create difficult and expensive problems by passing laws to satisfy a vocal part of their constituency. The information to follow is taken from the detailed comments of the DOE official who observed the problems first hand.

Congress passed the Price Anderson Reauthorization Act (PAAA) in 1988 in response to pressure from anti-nuclear protestors and concerns created by nuclear and industrial accidents. The reauthorization took away the blanket indemnification of contractors operating DOE facilities, and imposed legal conditions based on Nuclear Regulatory Commission practices for licensing commercial nuclear facilities. Contractors could only be indemnified only as long as they operated within a narrow “risk envelope.” The outcome was that the “expert based” approach to operations that had been employed successfully had to be replaced by strict procedural controls (as described in part in Chapter 11 of the book).

DOE oversight people were required to become adversarial policemen as contractors were being forced by the new law to replace knowledge-based operations with procedural controls. DOE headquarters reacted by bringing in large numbers of former Navy nuclear personnel, because it was seen that the Navy nuclear program was a successful model. “Sadly, many of these people did not understand nearly as much about operating facilities as those that hired them thought. Nuclear facilities with diverse operations are very different from naval reactors with very specific and limited operations. The cultural challenge (new oversight requirements, new managers that did not understand operations, and new oversight organizations that did not have a mission objective) was a perfect storm to affect the future of Rocky Flats operations.”

“It didn’t help Rocky Flats that Rockwell did not have a nuclear operations background, and was not corporately well equipped to deal with the new world” “The DOE staff likewise were not prepared for the new world. At Rocky Flats, the local DOE office had about 50 people; most involved in contract administration. To meet the new expectations, it suddenly had the workload of an organization several times larger. In addition, Washington HQ staff were not inclined to help the local office, and an adversarial relationship soon developed.”

The Soviets continued to be our enemy, court rulings put DOE sites out of compliance with waste management laws, and Congress passed a law that ended successful knowledge-based operations. Perhaps that explains why Rocky Flats was a difficult place to work.