Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge - History

History

The Rocky Flats site is 6,240 acres (25.3 km2) located along the Front Range of Colorado at the intersection of Jefferson, Boulder, and Broomfield counties. The site lies on the former nuclear weapons production facility operated by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Rocky Flats Plant.

Plutonium "triggers," also called nuclear pits, were manufactured at the site for 40 years. The triggers were themselves nuclear-fission bombs designed to implosively ignite fusion reactions in thermonuclear warheads. There were serious leaks from outside-stored drums of radioactive waste in the 1950s and 1960s that originated from spent lubricant used in plutonium milling .

Plutonium can spontaneously combust at room temperatures in air, and major plutonium-based fires at Rocky Flats in 1957 and 1969 were the most costly industrial incidents of their time. These two fires took years for immediate-area clean-up, and many other fires occurred as well. These fires spread plutonium throughout the northwest corridor of the Greater Denver area, reaching into downtown by way of prevailing winds. As plutonium has a 24,000-year half-life, nearly all of this contamination still exists in some form, and has been spread by the substantial (up to 80 mile-per-hour) winds that can frequent the Front Range area at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Water and soil contamination was finally publicly reported in the 1970s, even though the leakage and fire-spread contamination had occurred many years earlier.

As reported in the press, "The 1980s were no better for the U.S. Department of Energy facility, culminating in a Federal Bureau of Investigation raid in 1989 that shut it down for multiple violations of U.S. anti-pollution laws."

Subsequent to substantial public protests over time, in 1992, the mission of the Rocky Flats site changed from weapons production to environmental cleanup and closure. Rocky Flats was declared as a Superfund site, and most of the production facilities were removed in 1995. Radioactive contamination (plutonium, uranium, tritium and trans-uranic elements) was removed from the surface of the earth in the immediate area of the plant, but not removed from what is proposed to become a wildlife refuge. Contamination was also broadly left buried below-ground when it was found there in order to mitigate costs to the U.S. Government.

After the June 1989 FBI raid of the Rocky Flats Plant for investigation of environmental crimes, federal authorities used the subsequent grand jury investigation to gather evidence of wrongdoing and then sealed the record. The court allowed the Rocky Flats operators to withhold from the public data about the nature and extent of contamination on and off the site. In October 2006, DOE announced completion of the Rocky Flats “cleanup” without this information being available.

Under the Refuge Act, most of the 6,240-acre (25.3 km2) Rocky Flats site may become a refuge, provided that certification from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is obtained and which asserts that the cleanup and closure have been completed.