Rocky Flats Diary: Radioactive Stalactites and Contamination Pranks : Whistle-blower: A nuclear plant employee’s work notes form the basis of a lawsuit. Years of negligence and safety violations are alleged.

When she started working at Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in 1984, Jacqueline Brever started keeping a journal. It would help her remember procedures, she figured.

But as the months passed, the journal became a log of all that was wrong at the plant: horseplay, sleeping on the job, workers deliberately contaminating other workers, a room so contaminated with radioactive material that walking on its concrete floor was like walking on a sponge.

“When we told them we weren’t going to a job, it wasn’t safe, they just got someone else to do it and we had to clean up their mess. It was a nightmare,” Brever said.

Brever, 34, a former chemical operator who left the plant in April, 1991, and former co-worker Karen Pitts have filed suit against Rockwell International and EG&G; Inc., the former and present operators of Rocky Flats, and 19 individuals.

The women claim that they were deliberately contaminated with radioactive material because they talked to the FBI and to a grand jury investigating the plant’s safety and environmental problems.

Brever’s journal, which she made available to the Associated Press, describes how decontamination teams slept on the job or played cards. Moreover, company radiation inspectors dismissed contamination incidents as statistical errors. One employee was suspected of deliberately contaminating others, according to the journal.

Tim Tomastik, spokesman for the Department of Energy, the government agency that runs Rocky Flats, refused to comment on the journal because of the pending lawsuit.

At first, Brever said, the journal served merely as a memory aid.

“Then I realized that some of the stuff I was writing we shouldn’t be doing,” she said. “I brought it to the attention of management, and the more I brought it to their attention, the more trouble it caused.”

Eventually, she says, she was forced to resign.

Rocky Flats is the only U.S. facility that makes the cores for atomic bombs for nuclear warheads. Located 16 miles northwest of Denver, it is operated for the Energy Department by EG&G;, which took over as contractor in January, 1990.

The plant’s plutonium operations were suspended in December, 1989, after repeated safety violations and problems. The plant was also the target of a June 6, 1989, FBI raid, and a grand jury is investigating allegations of illegal disposal of hazardous and toxic wastes.

The journal entries are terse, unemotional, sometimes written in the first person and sometimes in the third. They offer a litany of nuclear misconduct, some of it mere sloppiness, some of it apparently intentional.

Brever and Pitts were assigned to plutonium recovery operations at the plant, reclaiming scraps of radioactive wastes for reuse.

Brever’s notes describe areas of the plant known as “caustic canyon” and “precip canyon,” the plutonium reprocessing areas of Building 371 at Rocky Flats. Brever said the building is so contaminated with radioactive plutonium wastes that “it’s on the floor heaped in piles. Walking on concrete feels like a sponge. It’s incredibly radioactive.”

It also describes work in Building 771, a building so contaminated that Henson Moore, a DOE deputy secretary, called it a “horror story” and said it should never be reopened. Building 771 also recovers plutonium.

The problems began in 1984, shortly after Brever went to work, according to her journal. Technicians turned off radiation alarms to avoid having to respond and employees engaged in horseplay. They tossed radioactive rags at each other and poured cleaning solution on the floor so people would slip and fall.

According to the journal, workers were ordered to keep production lines running, even though they had to wear full face masks for the entire shift because of radioactive contamination.

On Oct. 3, 1985, a can of radioactive calcium wastes blew its lid in a cold-storage room because management had it taken out of the processing area while it was still damp. Brever’s journal cites inconsistent results from radiation tests performed on workers present at the time. The tests showed that some workers were highly contaminated and others were not.

On March 3, 1986, a faulty band on a large glove box, a workstation for radioactive materials, popped off while workers were trying to transfer contaminated waste. Brever reached up to put the band back on the glove box and got sucked into the waste by a vacuum pump designed to keep radiation inside the glove box.

Her face mask was heavily contaminated and she was forced to shower with it on, perhaps contaminating the rest of her body. Radiation monitors did not take full-body radiation counts as required.

On Sept. 5, 1986, at the beginning of her shift, Brever pulled the union steward aside and told him about getting contaminated by radiation on Aug. 18.

“He warned me about another employee and said, ‘The guy is well known for purposely getting people hot (radioactive) but they could never prove it.’ I was told by (the union steward) to be very careful around another employee and not to say anything to anyone and not to ever be alone. (The union steward) assured me he would always be there if I needed to call or if it gets too bad,” Brever wrote.

Then it happened again.

Her entry for Oct. 29, 1986: “Came up mysteriously hot (radioactive) again. . . . I was screaming hot (radioactive) on left leg. No source found.”

Brever again suspected deliberate contamination by the other employee, but couldn’t prove it.

On Nov. 19, 1986, Brever requested radiation tests for her crew after being told that she and her crew had been working all week, without respiratory protection, in an area with airborne radiation problems. She and Pitts both tested positive, but company radiation officials dismissed the results as an error.

In 1987, Brever was ordered to run production lines in someone else’s area. She found a radioactive mess, then discovered that she was contaminated. No help came because the radiation monitors were in the cafeteria, playing cards with managers.

She later learned that someone on the previous shift had posted a sign warning that the room was radioactive, but someone else had taken the sign down.

“Filed safety concern. Union shelved grievance because would get union members into trouble,” Brever’s journal said. The journal entry went on to say that union members were warned that Brever and Pitts were “out to get them.”

Her next entry: “May, 1987, Company gets $8.6-million award for safety and management excellence.”

A 1988 entry describes how “birds literally fell out of the sky, dead,” when Pitts opened a hydrofluoric acid shed outside Building 771. A 1990 entry said workers paved over radioactive liquid found in an area where they were building a parking lot.

Later that year, Brever wrote that the Building 771 water supply was contaminated when a radioactive processing line backed up. “Operators were ordered not to take showers or drink the water,” the journal said.

In 1988, Brever went to work in Building 371, which, like Building 771, reprocessed radioactive wastes.

“Canyons (work areas) so saturated due to spills that have characteristics of hot stalagmites and stalactites of dried, contaminated caustic,” she wrote of the building in 1989. “Floors spongy. Operators go into rooms with full face masks only. Personnel sleeping in contaminated pit. Personnel joy rides with contaminated burnables in bag in back of truck, contaminates truck.”

At the end of her journal, Brever offers an explanation of why she put up with the problems for so long:

“What about (our) futures? We can never do our jobs again. Our reputations are ruined. . . . We can never make this wage on the outside and we now have the reputation of being whistle-blowers, therefore there aren’t any companies we can think of who will hire us. We are unable to get outside insurance because we are now health risks. . . . How long will it be before this all comes to an end?” she wrote.