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Gerald Foster of Denver, CO, asks
Where I live in Denver is about ten miles from Rocky Flats, which has been active in the past in the nuclear weapons
program. We are told that removal and cleanup of the area is
underway. What is the status of the program, especially the hazard
reduction efforts for the surrounding area-at least ten miles worth?
Tom Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project replies:
They are just getting started on the cleanup, and it is going badly. The
Department of Energy and its contractors have experienced several recent
mishaps and problems, and face some very serious problems for the future.
These include issues associated with the storage of plutonium in barrels
that are becoming pressurized with hydrogen gases, loose plutonium in the
ductworks, environmental cleanups of mind-boggling proportions, etc. I
wouldn't live within ten miles of the plant, personally.
Jim Werner of the Department of Energy replies:
The workers at the Rocky Flats site have made tremendous
progress on risk reduction and cleanup in the past couple of years.
Perhaps the biggest news at the site is that in the last year we have
cleaned up three of the top ten highest priority cleanup areas,
shipped more waste offsite for disposal than in the past five years
and decommissioned and demolished the first formerly radioactive
production facility.
The Department has also made substantial progress on reducing the
urgent risks at Rocky Flats. The highly enriched uranium solutions
have been removed from Rocky Flats, eliminating the single biggest
worker risk on site. Also, we have safely vented more than 1,100
residue drums from Building 771, and we have completed all plutonium
related activities specified in the new Rocky Flats regulatory
agreement.
The Department has also laid the groundwork for accelerated cleanup
and closure of Rocky Flats: We formed a Site Specific Advisory Board
to provide an effective forum for community input into the cleanup
process. We negotiated a regulatory agreement with EPA and the State
of Colorado that spells out enforceable cleanup milestones and
streamlines the regulatory process, and we have established an
aggressive ten-year closure plan that would substantially eliminate
the risks at Rocky Flats by 2006. To help get this work done, we
selected (through competitive bidding) a new experienced environmental
contractor - the Kaiser-Hill Company. We also changed the structure
to a first of its kind performance-based contract that requires
progress towards specific cleanup goals for the contractor to get
paid.
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