Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge - Controversy

Controversy

The government-claimed remediation of contamination by plutonium (a radioactive element with a 24,000 year half-life) and uranium created over decades of nuclear weapons production, fires and criticality accidents at Rocky Flats remains a hotly contested issue.

Charges include the claim that the U.S. Government only labeled the area as a wildlife refuge in order to cut a deal on minimizing its own cleanup costs, which were originally estimated to be $37 Billion spent over 70 years. The actual cleanup costs and time spent were only a fraction of those numbers, with below-ground contamination almost entirely left in-place.

Key leaders in both educating the public and pursuing contamination information that remains withheld by the U.S. Government include Dr. Leroy Brown, a Boulder scientist, retired FBI Special Agent Jon Lipsky, who led the FBI's raid of the Rocky Flats plant to investigate illegal plutonium burning and other environmental crimes and Wes McKinley, who was the foreman of the grand jury investigation into the operations at Rocky Flats and is today a Colorado State Representative.

Lawsuits by downwind local residents against the Rocky Flats prime contractors over time, Dow Chemical and Rockwell International, have escalated in value to nearly $1 Billion due to a court-mandated annual interest rate. While the most recent award has been overturned on appeal, the case is expected to ultimately land in the U.S. Supreme Court. The contractors are indemnified for their liability by the U.S. Government.

In direct contention with stated plans for eventually granting public access to Rocky Flats, the area has been proposed as a permanent exclusion area in terms of human habitation by way of making it a nuclear guardianship.

Most recently, invasive weeds that are capable of bringing below-ground radioactive contamination—which was not required to be remediated as part of the so-called clean-up—have recently been described in local media as threatening the purpose for existence of the Rocky Flats "wildlife refuge."

Quotes:

• "The inspector general overseeing the U.S. Interior Department issued a report (below) late last month warning that the 4,880-acre former nuclear-trigger factory is overrun with invasive weeds that could destroy the unique biology that served as the reason for establishing the refuge in the first place."

• "The invasive species raise the specter of nuclear contaminants spreading to surface water, the report says. But there isn’t enough money to eradicate the weeds, and even if there was, the contaminated ground may prove too dangerous for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore, the report cautions."