An Idyllic Scene Polluted With Controversy

ROCKY FLATS NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Colo. -- These rolling grasslands and foothills would seem a hiker’s dream. The valleys are deep, the deer docile and the snowy mountain backdrop dazzling.

“The wildlife is really abundant here,” said Mark Sattelberg, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist. “It’s been pretty much undisturbed for 40 or 50 years.”

But critics say the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge site has been disturbed plenty.

To them, the land is synonymous with government secrecy, widespread environmental violations and pollution from nuclear weapons production done here throughout the Cold War.

They say the soil and water on the 6,000-acre refuge, scheduled to open in two years, remain contaminated and that recent tests found plutonium and uranium in deer living there. Federal officials said the levels were acceptable.

“Are you going to eat a deer from out there?” asked Wes McKinley, a Democratic state legislator and former foreman of a grand jury that investigated pollution violations at Rocky Flats. “What if you read a label on your hamburger that said it had an acceptable amount of E. coli bacteria?”

McKinley, who held a news conference last month to protest going ahead with the refuge, has proposed legislation requiring visitors to be warned of the risks of entering the sanctuary.

“I wouldn’t go there. What if you breathe in a particle of plutonium or are exposed to gamma radiation and get cancer later?” he said. “I think the whole thing is irresponsible.”

Congress has ordered the refuge be opened after the cleanup is completed in 2006. Federal wildlife and Energy Department officials noted that the refuge was not on the actual site where weapons had been made and that critics hadn’t visited to learn about the testing being done to ensure the place was safe.

“We are trying to separate fact from legend,” said John Rampe, an Energy Department environmental scientist. “We have done a million environmental samples on the refuge.”

Some have turned up problems.

“We find occasional plutonium or other contaminants that don’t meet state standards,” Rampe said. “When we find it, we remove it. We have removed dozens of miles of soil, scraped off the top layers and sent them to waste facilities.”

From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for hydrogen bombs -- leaving behind polluted water, earth and air.

The plant, 16 miles northwest of Denver, once housed 14.2 tons of plutonium and 7.3 tons of uranium. Much of the waste was buried in barrels that rusted out, allowing contaminants to leach into the soil.

At least one building here was dubbed the most dangerous structure in the country by the Energy Department.

Most of the plant was shut down in 1989, and the remaining metalworking operations closed in 1992, officials said. Rocky Flats was owned by the federal government and operated by Rockwell International Corp., which eventually was fined $18.5 million for environmental violations.

Jon Lipsky, the FBI agent who led a raid on the facility in 1989, said recently that the investigation ended prematurely, leaving questions about the extent of pollution at Rocky Flats.

“How can they let children go to that site when they know they haven’t cleaned it up?” he asked. “The less people know, the less they are required to clean up.”

The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, an activist group in Boulder, Colo., plans to sue to keep the refuge from opening.

“I don’t think a plutonium-contaminated site is a good place for people to engage in recreation,” said LeRoy Moore, one of the organization’s founders. “I don’t believe there is an acceptable level of plutonium; it remains dangerous in even minuscule quantities. The whole thing is a risky concept.”

None of the controversy surrounding the refuge site surprises Steve Gunderson of the state Department of Public Health and Environment.

As coordinator of the Rocky Flats cleanup operation, Gunderson spends most of his waking moments dealing with the site.

“Rocky Flats hits all of the quintessential hot buttons -- radioactivity, nuclear weapons, hazardous waste,” he said. “It has all the buzzwords, and it’s hard to separate emotion from objectivity. This was a place where the government did things in a whole lot of secrecy for many, many years, but the cleanup is basically being done in a fishbowl. Rocky Flats has had more environmental sampling than any other place in the country.”

The presence of radioactive elements in the soil and in the deer at the refuge, Gunderson said, unfortunately was normal.

“There has been plutonium in the environment ever since atmospheric nuclear testing was conducted,” he said. “What you are seeing is consistent with background levels of radiation.”

The refuge, scheduled to partially open in 2007 and be in full operation about 2012, will have hiking trails, interpretive signs and limited hunting. It surrounds the area where the actual nuclear production went on, which will remain closed. Hundreds of workers carrying out cleanup operations are in easy view of the refuge. Radioactive waste is trucked out in stainless steel vats measuring 8 feet around and 10 feet high; it is being disposed of in Carlsbad, N.M.

Yet a few hundred yards away, herds of deer graze in tall prairie grass. Kestrels soar overhead, scanning the frozen ground for rodents. Elk wander through the meadows, and the occasional mountain lion slinks in for the ample venison.

Sattelberg, of the Fish and Wildlife Service, gunned his sport utility vehicle up the steep snowy hills, past an abandoned homestead, stopping to look at a few deer that stared back but didn’t budge.

An expert on how contaminants affect wildlife, Sattelberg said he had seen no evidence of animals being hurt by pollution here.

“There is absolutely no reason to warn people about this place. The refuge is safe; it would only scare people,” he said. “But if the law requires it, we will follow the law. We want to tell people what went on here, the history of the place.”

Rampe said the odds of getting cancer from visiting the refuge was about 5 in 1 million.

“That would be if they made 100 visits a year, spending 2.5 hours per visit for 30 years,” he said. “There is a calculable risk, but it’s so small that it makes you wonder if there is any risk at all.”