please, check out our web site. again, it's www.press.org. thank you, we're adjourned. [applause] .. on sunday at 2:00 p.m. eastern, the eagle forum leadership group

will be meeting. the harlem book fair and leadership summit is part of book tv and c-span2. more now from book tv. kristen iversen recounts her childhood in arvada, colorado, adjacent to the chennai nuclear weapon isolate it. using elements of memoir writing commish investigates what the u.s. government did not divulge to the local populace. this is about an hour. >> thank you so much for being here tonight. it is such a pleasure to be here at a bookstore that is such an important bookstore in the area and in the country.

my book, "full body burden: growing up in the nuclear shadow of rocky flats", is a book about my childhood in arvada, colorado. i grew up there about 7 miles from the rocky flats nuclear weapons plant. actually, the first one is about 7 miles away. in 1969 we moved to a subdivision called by novell, which was closer to the plant. about three or 3.5 miles away from rocky flats. my sisters and brother and i, we had an idyllic childhood, innocence that we had horses and dogs and we spent a lot of time outdoors, driving a horses around the field. limning in the lake. we never knew what went on at rocky flats. we have no idea what it really was. we had no idea of the environmental contamination that was happening. plutonium and carbon chloride

and a number of things in the environment. we had no idea. many kids in my neighborhood, including mean, i worked at the plant myself and got a sense of what it was like to be on the inside of the plant. there was one evening when i came home from working at rocky flats and turns on the television and there was a show on "nightline." it was an exposé of what had been happening at the plant. it was the first time i had an idea what was happening at rocky flats and how extraordinary that contamination wise. it was on that day i decided to quit my job at rocky at rocky fs come and get back what was the day i decided that i would write a book about it. it took me about 10 years of research and writing to pull the story together. i wanted to write a book that reads like a novel, but it is very heavily footnoted and

everything in the book is factual. you can check in the back and see where the information comes from. i wanted to write the story on the perspective of all the different kinds of people whose lives have been affected by rocky flats. not just residents like me and my family. but workers at rocky flats, some of the activists, all of the different people, thousands and thousands of people in colorado and beyond who were affected by rocky flats. another reason i felt very passionate about the story is because we continue to deal with the legacy of nuclear weapons production in this country. in so many different ways. there is an environmental and also a cultural legacy of how important this plant was in the way that it affected people. people who are not aware how they were being affected. when i worked at the plant, it was common for workers to call themselves cold war warriors. those are the people on the line. the people who live near rocky

flats, no one told us. the plant was operated with chemicals. we thought they were making household cleaning supplies. my mother thought they were making scrubbing bubbles. it was not apparent for quite a while what was going on. what would happen at rocky flats is that there had been a cleanup, but a very controversial cleanup. a controversial level of contamination remaining in the soil. 1300 acres of that site are so profoundly contaminated that it can never be opened. for human habitation. the rest of the site is set to open up at the national wildlife refuge for hiking and biking and hunting. even though it still does have contamination on the site. there's a lot of homebuilding and in shopping malls and other commercial buildings going on as well. even on colorado in the country as a whole, we would like to

forget that rocky flats ever happen, it was a story we would like to put in the past. so we don't have to deal with anymore. the truth of the matter is it is a very important story that we will have to continue to deal with now and into the future. plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. it is not going away anytime soon. it is something that we have to live with. one thing i am going to talk about this evening briefly from three points of view of the book, i am going to begin with a childhood section of the book. the way it is written is the story of history of the plant itself woven together. i want to give you a taste of those two different storylines. this first section i will read from his from when i was a child, and it is the first time i rode out to stanley lake, lake near our house, which is currently contaminated with plutonium in the sediment of the lake.

but we do not know at the time. the first time i rode my horse to the lake, the wind whipped my hair across my face that it stung. my horse is eager to ride. i rode bareback. the rings were taunted and his head was arched like a roman horse. he prances and incense. let's run, let's run. he can gather himself into a low rolling cannonball. i am crouched low and not hang on. maximum contact, minimum control. i am alone. that is the best part to be alone with a horse in the gently rolling hills and wind bending the tall prairie grass into ripples of gold. i try to make talk calmly, about what happens to young writers

whose galloping can snap is easy as a foreigner tree branch. there is no remedy but a bullet to the head. there are hundreds and thousands of potentially mounds and bumps. but my horse dislikes caution. he knows when we will be past the houses and roads, but will drop the reins and very my face in his mane and let him run. we prance across the wooden bridge arching over the ditch. i try to maintain illusion of control, as long as i am within range. we passed the community bar, go to another date, chock passed along, break into a light anticipatory sweat we surround the lake.

there is a building loosely constructed. the heavy padlock hangs from the latch. i slide off, and spring back up. the horse can hardly contain himself. my vantage point is extraordinary. the lake stretches below us nearly a mile in diameter. bluewater extends in gentle liberals to at the moment of early visible cottonwoods on the first i've heard the wind dies to a whisper and it is quiet. almost perfectly still, except for the snap of grasshoppers leaping from the weeds. the mountains rise suddenly, almost violently from the sandy ground of the planes. layered silhouettes of blue and green and gray, melting into a turquoise sky. my heart is filled with the beauty of it. tonka will wait no longer. i've won his head, stuck his nose to his chest, and twist my hands in his mane. i shall go. he races to the other side of

the lake. i barely keep my hold. there is mud, i can see it. will he race into the water? i see the body first print i ready myself for his response. the sliding stops, the sort of astonishment and a surge of fear. he knew i had seen it first. he spins around on his back functions and i pulled up short. the lower half of the body laser meltwater. the upper half extends long and rigid across the ground. her head stretches up achingly as if she had tried to pull herself out. the authors are bulged. has the taliban shot? drowned? which he said? there are no other cattle inside. i look again across the lake. cool, blue, and utterly empty. the lake feels empty.

it is too far to yell for one of my sisters. i chastise myself fiercely for not having the courage to investigate. we gallop all the way home, tonka on the bumpy ground. i think i was the day that i first had a sense that maybe something is not quite right. i'm going to skip up and talk about the point where it actually might work at the plant myself read it is quite a dramatic history in 1989, after years of raids on the plant. it is the only time in our history where two agencies had been investigating.

the first one was dow and rockwell. my family and neighbors, we were largely unaware of everything that happened at the plant. when the plant happened in 1989, i was actually living in germany at the time, working as a journalist. one of the great ironies of my life was that i spent a lot of time traveling around the globe looking for good stories to write about. and it turned out that the most important story that i had to tell was really quite literally what was happening in my own backyard. in the next section i went to work at the plant in 1994. i was a singl parent with two children. i was putting myself through graduate school. rocky flats was, as it had been for a long time, one of the best jobs in town. he provided a lot of people with jobs. this is the section that i mentioned earlier when i come home from work and turn on the television.

but that my children to bed and come out and watch tv. i go upstairs and took off my shoes. and make a cup of tea, stretch out on the couch, and turned on the television. i give myself a few minutes before i go to bed. suddenly i said bold upright. rocky flats is on television. abc "nightline" talks about yours or contamination at rocky flats and how production was halted after the 1989 fbi raid. since then, rocky flats has been a state wanted to resume building nuclear weapons while trying to deal with this. it is number five of the top 10 most dangerous places in the nation. building 776 is number two. there was an internal memo that

shows as much as 13.2 metric tons of plutonium may be stockpiled around the plant, including more than 5000 sealed containers of waste. many containing a build up of hydrogen gas that can cause a container to rupture and scatter plutonium. these are 5000 girls that stood out for 11 years. the bottoms of the girls are rusted out and all of that material went into our water supply. mark silverman, the doe manager appears on screen. i know his voice well from the pa system at work. we know that clintonian is in the vents and in the ductwork and we know it is in the walls and ceilings. we just can't tell you exactly how much of it is in any given location in a lot of places. he adds that there was very poor record keeping. we don't know where every pipe is for every line is have a nice

day, i think him and that was the one that often heard i often heard on the pa when they would make announcements at rocky flats. they would say something like the winds are blowing 100 miles an hour, hold on, things are bad, have a nice day. have a nice day, i think. i grab my journal and start scribbling the words this may look like an anonymous stretch of asphalt. my heart jumped. that is the 903 pad that i walk by on my lunch hour. contaminated groundwater leaks down the ridge in the northern and western suburbs of denver. some of the girls busted inside are leaking and toxic waste can be traced on a map with drainage patterns in the rocky flats area. samples from the bottoms of both reservoirs show those deposits up plutonium.

jim kelly from the longtime worker at rocky flats who is on the roof during a mother's day fire, shakes his head. it was production, production, production. safety was a word. it was a really practice. the dog was -- the job was to get the product at the door. if you didn't, they wouldurn their head. he interviews brian ross, that gentleman who wrote the story of the runway to the press. they didn't care whether they work in the federal government or in the private sector or how high up in the government they were. he knows that some sections were taken out of that jury report. almost all of them had to do with the conclusions of the jury that the illegal conduct that they found at rockwell was continuing to be done under the successor contractor.

one of the grand jurors appears on screen. i have nightmares, she says, i couldn't sleep at night thinking about what i had heard for a whole week in that jury room. a resident who lived down the way from the plant since 1964, says that the housing development continues to grow as home builders lobby the county planning commission. the developers is only matched by their homeowners were kept in the rent, thanks to the sealed grand jury report. i paced the dark living room for an hour before putting on my neck down. so many of the things that i feared we were afraid even think about are true. israel, and it is still going on. i take out my journal again.

oh my god, i can't wait. that is the moment when i decided to take out my pen and journal and write a book. i'm going to skip back in time to little bit to the 1969 fire. there were many fires at rocky flats. very bad one in 1957, one in 1969. that happened right after my family -- after we had moved out to rocky flats. it was mother's day, and we were all having a nice mother's day brunch like everyone else in our community. we had no idea that there was a fire at the plutonium building of the plant. one of the more remarkable things about this particular fire is that there was independent off-site testing done at that time that found plutonium as far as away as 30 miles from the plant. in elementary school, my elementary school was 12 miles from the plant, it shows

plutonium deposits. the department of energy and rocky flats officials were forced to admit for the first time that there was off-site contamination. so we learned at that point, some people knew at that point of the more interesting thing is that the department of energy said well, it is not just from the 1969 fire. in fact from the 1957 fire, which burned up 620 filters and had not been changed in four years, there was contamination that came on the 1957 fire and when i mentioned earlier, thousands of barrels leaking into the ground. that was the first time that the public began to have an inkling of the extent of the contamination. even then, the day after the fire from a couple days after the fire, there was a notice in the paper that said there had been an incident at rocky flats. it was buried in the back of the

paper right next to the head pet of the week. it was very much minimized. two people, though dennison and fred skinner. i had interviews i conducted myself in interviews that were part of oral history. the carnegie library in boulder, colorado. having this great material to draw from as i wrote these chapters. these two men who are fighting this fire, they are not firefighters. they are guards. they should have a mother's day, it was a low stuff dated because of the holiday. they showed up to the gate and are told to go down to the plutonium processing building to the fires. when they arrive, it looks quiet and clean, at least from the

outside. there is a loading dock doors on each side, and instead of double doors that leads into an interior hallway. the mental on their masks and strap on their tanks. co2 only, no water. they open the door, move into the hallway, and move into the main production area. stan stops in his tracks. the room is nearly pitch black. a few emergency lights go out. the only noise comes from the fans leaving the fire that he can feel more than secret i can't even see my hand in front of my face, he mutters. smoke rolls towards them in waves. there is an orange glow that moves closer. a looks at the flames are shooting up over the boxes. one, two, three boxes. no, all of them. he knows the look of this kind of fire. it reminds them of the fires that have seen in films. fast-moving flames and the color is different. it has distinct unearthly

brilliance of unearthly metal. what is that? plutonium, probably the magnesium component, too. it's not just the plutonium. it is the chemicals. it's burning? ways of burning? the plexiglas, too. the plexiglas is on fire. it takes a lot of radiant heat to make something like that flammable. this fire has been going on for a while. it is hard to tell whether light fixtures or pendants are crashing, they carry plutonium nuggets down the line. time is short. he knows this building. both men have walked it hundreds of times upstairs and downstairs. the two buildings are connected, but 776 is two floors, 777 has one floor. protecting 777 is crucial.

the filters stretch across the entire roof area. sam likes to compare it to the air filter on a car. but the car we clean the air before you put into the engine. in the plutonium processing building to meet clean it in the air before you blow it up into the atmosphere. if the fire burns through in the 777 rue, massive amounts of plutonium, as well as other contaminants and radioactive material will spread over the denver area and beyond. stan opens the cabinet. he finds a hard hat. where are the other firefighters? they are unaware of the team that is coming in from the other side of the building. they enter the room until they find buckets of sand in quarters for its commission fires. move toward the edge of the fire

and stand near the flames but it is like throwing grains of rice in the face of an oncoming locomotive. the fire continues to grow. bill grabbed acog canister. they fire them into the boxes. it has little effect. the empty another canister. the air in the room is unbearably hot and the men are breathing heavily. already they are almost out of air. the fire gallops through the line. what now? heels were they supposed to do? who are they supposed to ask? this is useless. you can't use water and plutonium together because they will react. they ignored the radiation monitor. don't step outside these lines. keep the contamination inside these lines. as it turned one could possibly

recognize a line of shock. bill asked to stand for confirmation. what the heck, he's a firefighter, not a guard. he has lived in the country in nearly all he knows about firefighting is how to beat a prairie grass fire with a burlap sack. use the fine spray. got it. see what happens. okay. they reenter the building, this time with water hoses. we will take pains going forward. we need to keep each other cooled down. let's had toward the center, stan says. okay. bill turns to stan and stan moves forward into the smoke, trying to follow the emergency lighting on the floor. don't blow any of those

plutonium pieces together. keep them separated. i know, blue flash. he does not. what is happening here is that the world is so warm, so hot from the fire company starting to rise like a marshmallow bubble. the problem is if the roof were to break, i would not be here. working in tandem, they move along the line, spraying water on the flames, then on each other. they have gotten a few feet were they see were the real buyer lives. in the boundary area where the plutonium has melted and cast into pieces that are true to the production line. the boundary line is 100 feet long and contains eight furnaces held inside glove boxes. the entire line is ablaze. bill curses. the men glanced at each other. the production area is tight. there's only one way to get there. through the underpasses. some boxes have tiny stairs

going down into a miniature basement with steps leading up the other side. this allows workers to get from one side of the production line to the other. the underpasses have no dreams. anything that spills on her glove box is contaminated and has to be cleaned up, not fleshed out. there is no place for the water to go, and the underpasses are filled with water. the water is rising. it is like a pit, and laughs. we are looking right at it. who is going in? both men are silent. bill looks up and sees an elevator flipped upside down. the metal scorch and twisted. people are going to get killed tonight, and he thinks it might be him and stan. he thinks of his wife was pregnant and has two other kids. both men were trained for the battlefield, but it didn't prepare them for this.

one thing it did teach them was to keep their feelings to themselves. bill wade said. he thinks he is moving fast, but it feels slow. he prays they have not not any plutonium pieces into the water, which could lead to the criticality that they fear. then he is at the other side in the fire is so hot, so immediate that his coveralls dry instantly. his face feels scorch beneath his mask. stan is behind him. they spread the fire until the air drums while a few minutes. then they drop their hoses, wade through the water again and fight their way back to the door. radiation monitors are waiting when they burst into the building and yank off their masks. you are hot. he cannot hide his fear. he cannot go back then. we are all right, no, you are off the chart. we have to go back. stan reaches for his airtime.

are you going to keep us here so we can watch the roof melt? you guys are not going back into that building. who else is there? we are waiting on more guys. we don't have anyone ask that. we don't even have enough here. we are waiting for boulder and greenfield greenfield to bring more intense. the only manager on duty that the men are aware of is a the guard captain who is on the phone. is that you, george? he recognizes him from the washroom. i can't let you back in. come on, what are you thinking? event is on the way to take workers to building 5592 the contamination. let the fire get into this and denver is screwed. give us the tapes.

they grab their tanks and go past them. they said back into the building. i will go first this time, stan shouts. he runs into the production line. he runs back and forth and sprays anything that doesn't look like the tony him. after a few minutes he sprays him down and they switch. bill can't move quite as quickly as stan, but it feels like they're making progress. they are both thinking about the roof. stan nods. he wonders if the heat and exertion are causing them to go through the air tanks more quickly than usual for the tanks are only partially filled. abruptly, stan is knocked to the floor, on his back, covered with debris come he can't see anything. he does not lose consciousness, but it takes him a moment for him to realize his body is covered with sealing material.

he thinks this is at. it. the roof is gone. it is over. but nothing happened. he looks up to see bill standing and he finds that he can move his arms and legs and so he sits up and looks around. he is covered with gunk, sticky gunk come and he pulls a soggy piece off of his arm. bill points to a gap in the ceiling, 2-foot by 3-foot sections. they sprayed repeatedly with their hoses and piles class from the weight of the water. stan is covered with nothing more than soaked gunk. he stands up and bill clinton off. he cannot read bill's face. out in the outside, i hate to admit it, but i think that's the closest i've ever come to that. they start to laugh.

i'm going to read a little bit here at the end. with respect to what has happened with the fire. stan praises his mask and both men come out contaminated. for the citizens of colorado, there is hope. they play a big role. three lucky breaks are largely the result of human error. the first republic occurred earlier in the week when workers accidentally left behind a metal plate that blocks the north box wine. this plate forces the racing fire to turn from building 777, a single story building with a vulnerable roof that would've collapsed immediately to building 776. building 776 has a second story and is a little less susceptible. this buys some time. the second lucky break occurs

when burning plutonium turns into a oxide oxide ash come as heavy as wet cement. an investigator will report that the firemen had been successful in moving the storage and pushing pieces of the coming plutonium together, criticality would've been the inevitable result. the third stroke of luck is the most important. it is nothing short of déjà vu for bill dennis on. who'd fought the 1957 fire. just as in 1967, an accidental power cut off the current. the fans that had caused the roof to melt, the fire still burns, but more slowly. the roof holds. i think i will stop there.

if you have any questions, there is so much to talk about. so many things happened at rocky flats. i wanted to give you a little taste of this part of the story. there are a lot of heroes in this book. everyone -- there are many protests that rocky flats on the part of the workers who felt that they didn't want their jobs taken away and that sort of thing. and i think one of the things that i wanted to assess in the book was that level of secrecy in family, community, government, there is a price that. that is one of the things that i wanted to bring out. it happened in so many different

ways. when you have that kind of silencing and secrecy in a community, it divides the community. you have the activists, the workers, the residents, and often people who are at odds, even the workers. workers who were contaminated. they became ill from their work that rocky flats. then there were some workers worked who work out there for years and never got sick. of course, many workers were proud of the work that they did that rocky flats. but they had friction amongst the workers. those who got sick, what kind of story are we going to tell about rocky flats? i think it has been an interesting journey going around the country and talking about this book in hearing what people have to say. fukushima can change the conversation. we are talking about these things in very different ways now. for whatever reason, people are ready to talk about talk about rocky flats and whether they happen in the past. rocky flats was such an important part of the nuclear

weapons system in this country. it was one of 13 facilities. rocky flats was the factory. we produced more than 70,000 plutonium pits. i think now that people are finally ready to talk about the story in a very different way. yes? >> where did the workers go, what happened to them? what happened after the close rocky flats? what has since been done out there? >> well, first of all, i have to say there are very interesting acronyms and euphemisms for rocky flats. those of you to work for the government might be familiar with this. the pit is a trigger, it is a

euphemism in a way. the pit is a very important part of a nuclear bomb. plutonium came from hanford and then it was machine that rocky flats. it was melted in a foundry in and people work in glove boxes, which were linked stainless steel boxes, and workers would put her arms and hands into lead lined gloves and work with each particular piece. then it would go up and go on down the line. once the pits or triggers were ready to go, then they were sent to the pantex facility where they were encased into conventional explosives. at that point they would become part of a nuclear warhead. so i think one of the things that is interesting working at rocky flats was very easy for those of us who work there to believe, and production had stopped when i was out there, but it was very easy for us to think that we were not actually part of the bomb making process. we were not pulling the trigger,

we were not putting the bomb together. we were just making plutonium pits. you know, it is really an acronym for euphemism in a way of distancing yourself. another thing that i want to mention is your password at all the plutonium and pets go. when i worked at rocky flats, one of my jobs was to type up a report. we would work with managers and engineers, project managers, and type up reports that went to washington. at that time, i did not understand a lot of what i was writing about. one thing that kept coming up. two. and it was missing unaccounted for plutonium. we lost more than 3000 pounds of plutonium. where tobacco? there is a lot of speculation on the part of the department of energy and others as to where it went. but some of it is still out

there. some of it is in our backyard. although there was a cleanup, it really began in 1995 when i was working at the plant. the department of energy estimated it would take 70 years and $36 billion to queen of rocky flats. they did not think that they would have the technology to do it. of course, those are almost impossible figures. a lot of people at the time felt that rocky flats become a national sacrifice zone we should close it, cabinets, and pray it does not move. but we haven't done that. instead we have a compromised cleanup. the company was hired to come in and they did the cleanup in less than 10 years. for about $7 million. only a small portion of that went to cleanup water and soil. as i had mentioned briefly

earlier, the site is slated to open as a public wildlife refuge even though 1300 acres are so profoundly contaminated that they can never be open to the public. it was a facility of over 800 buildings. a very large plutonium production facility at the center. they were all connected by tunnels and all sorts of things. beneath the surface. that is how all the plutonium was transported. the way we were able to get a cleanup for only $7 billion, we had a very compromised standard. what that means is that for the top 3 feet of soil, we are allowing 54 it each gram of soil. from 3-d 3 feet to 6 feet, we are allowing 1000 to 3000 grams.

there are very hot high winds that come off the mountains. the windows in our house would rattle and buzz. when i worked at rocky flats, it was not uncommon for the workers have windshields blown out. a lot of rain and snow. many studies have shown that there is petroleum in the grass. the study shows how 12% of the soil is constantly being moved, thanks to all the groundhogs out there. like the scene with transport in the beginning, there are a lot of ground holes out there. plutonium is not simpler. it is almost impossible to contain it on-site. the cleanup that we have is a very controversial cleanup. we are busy building houses out there. an excerpt the book appeared in

reader's digest. i was at the rocky flats site with a film crew, and they can leave everything stirring up the dust. every time the dust is stirred up, it spends plutonium particles in the air. plutonium is very lethal. it can cause cancer or a help effect. plutonium has to be absorbed into the body in some way. it is most dangerous when it is inhaled into the lungs. we have seen elevated rates of lung cancer, lymphoma, brain tumors, a number of health effects and cancers in my neighborhood and in the areas around the rocky flats. yes? >> it is very compelling reading. i want to ask a little bit more about. my impression is that a single particle, i cannot recall the size of plutonium and hailed -- and you were pretty much done.

i can understand how two thirds of the population there are dead. seriously. >> yes, it is a very good question. there are studies going back to the 1970s that have shown elevated cancers and elevated health issues. there were a lot of heroes in my book. one of the heroes is doctor carl johnson. he was the director of the health department for a number of years out at rocky flats in the county. the county for help and group of builders said we would like to build houses out of rocky flats. it is a beautiful land. those of you who have been there, it is gorgeous. the mountains, the planes come it really is a beautiful environment. there is a lot of development going on out there. they said we should do some studies before we build.

and see exactly what is going on out there and if there is contamination in the soil. and if there are health effects in the population. he found health effects elevated levels of cancer and other diseases. and also other researchers since that time have confirmed his results, including the department of energy. the way that i see it is, as i said earlier, we are just finally getting to the point where we can have a conversation about rocky flats. there has been so much conflict about it. i would say there is a lot of collusion between the groups at rocky flats. people have been very -- they have wanted to believe that the area is safe. they wanted to be able to build houses and shopping malls and all of that. it is a high population area. it is little bit like the tobacco industry 20 or 30 years ago. when you said here are all these sick people. here is this over here.

can they be connected? in the study and the department of energy were even the colorado health department said yes, we have some elevated cancers in this went over here. show us and prove that there is a connection. i want to tell you briefly about one of the women that i write about in my book. her name is tamara. she grew up just down the road from us. we had horses and all sorts of animals. this was a mormon family. they had their own garden. it was an organic garden. they raise their own animals, cows and horses, and we lived off the win. one of the differences between our family and theirs is that we cannot dig a well. our father told us there was bathwater. they had a well entering the water directly out of of the stanley lake water table. that family had been very ill. she is one of the songs people i've ever met.

it was remarkable working with her with this book. she has now gone through surgery for the ninth brain tumor that she has. it is remarkable that she has survived it. she has really survived. the first reading of data from this book in colorado just a couple of nights ago, her entire family came. it was very important to them. and also a lot of other families like hers story has not been told, finally someone is talking about the stories. they're letting people know. and i certainly have been getting hundreds of e-mails from people in colorado, people who grew up next to rocky flats. and people who grew up on the facilities. hanford, here, we have for now, i just came back from the savanna river site. it is the same thing. certainly not just in the united states. there was a sister city in russia called my act. and they were doing the same thing.

they had very similar issues with contamination accidents in the same time period. the interesting thing to me, and i would dare say, that in some ways people living in russia with that plan, they were more aware of what was happening there than we were here in colorado, in entitled bill, in our neighborhood about what was happening at rocky flats. we had no idea. >> yes? >> [inaudible question] >> well, it is a fascinating story and i go into depth in the book. it really goes into that part like a thriller. it is an incredible story. there have been reports of rocky flats and problems at the very beginning. there was a gentleman named

gemstone on the plant was built in 1951, the plant started production in 1952. there was a problem with the engineering report in the beginning in terms of the location of the plant. they needed to locate the plant close to a growing population. it wasn't like los alamos where they had things on site and it was a company town. rocky flats had to be close to a growing population so that they had workers. at the same time from the needed something that was kind of her mouth. when they built rocky flats, the engineering report was mistakenly based on wind patterns at stapleton airport rather than the rocky flats site. so as i mentioned earlier, the winds come down off of that, even one of the requirements was the plant must be located in such a way that none of the material will blow over a major metropolitan area. well, that would blow right

across. as i said in the beginning, they said that they should not locate the plant here, and he was ignored. he continued to work with rocky flats over the years, and there were a number of things that happened that he was concerned about. they had these big solar ponds where were they were trying to evaporate a lot of the material. they didn't know how to try to make plutonium stable. so they mixed the plutonium with cement imported into blocks and they call this pond creek and they store these blocks in cardboard containers and store them out in the open. it never hardened. it was soft like jell-o. in fact, when i worked out there, workers refer to it as the jelly factory. you could stick your -- i never did but come you could stick your finger in it and it never hardened. it leached into the environment. these are two of the things that

jim was concerned about. he brought other things to light as well, such as the missing plutonium. this whole issue caught the attention of john linsky with the fbi, and he worked with another agent. another agent from the epa. they knew there were a number of things going on at rocky flats that was really bad. including they have an incinerator with the plutonium processing building. and they were burning half of the radioactive waste and had been doing so for years. gemstone was their first informant. they went and provided hours and hours of testimony that led to three flyovers over the plant. they took infrared photography at night in a small plane and were able to prove that there were thermal lines extending from the plant that indicated radioactive emissions into the

creeks, the lakes, stanley lake, our neighborhood. just that whole area. based on that information, they were able to set things up so that there was a really big investigation in 1989. john linsky and his partners, they got permission from the department of justice to enter the plant. so they would not be shot at. they were prepared to defend the plant. they told the officials at rocky flats they were going to have a meeting about some environmental terrorists are planning an attack on the plant. this is the part that would make a great scene in the movie, they walked into the meeting and all the rocky flats and officials are sitting there. they said actually we are here because we are about to raid the plant and there are 70 fbi agents at the gate and we are just ready to move in.

so the raid lasted for several days. it led to a 21 month grand jury investigation. that investigation uncovered a lot of things about contamination and ongoing contamination. but it turned out to be a florida investigation. the grand jurors wanted to endow and diet rockwell officials and people at the department of energy and it turned out that there were no indictments. they were not indicted for there were no indictments. the people in colorado had no idea. we had no idea why this was such an important thing for us now. the grand jurors were furious and they wrote their own report. they wanted coloradans to know that the contamination was ongoing. that report was sealed and it

remains sealed until the present day. there was a redacted highly edited version was released in 1992 with comments by the department of justice, but that report in and all of the documentation attached to it remains sealed to the day, and it is not available to the company's that did the cleanup at rocky ponds. >> [inaudible question] >> the secrets of rocky flats. they titled it something like rocky flats is still keeping its secrets. there is a lot of information that people should know. we should've known in the past. those of us who lived around the plant, we were cold war warriors. we were on the front line of the cold war but nobody told us. yes? >> [inaudible question]

>> well, there has been a lot in the press. anything that is a grand jury investigation is up to the judge. they have the right to keep it sealed. grand jurors themselves, if they said anything about what happened, they put themselves at risk. they can be put in jail. a lot of people have spoken up, including wes mckinley, you might've seen pictures of. he is a real character. he wears a cowboy hat. he eventually ran for office because of what happened at rocky flats. he was the foreman for the rocky flats grand jury and went on to talk about it. one thing that he has tried to do over the years is not only get that report unsealed, but he would like the national wildlife refuge, whether or not we open it to the public come he would

like signs out there. a lot of people like signs that say, this is what happened here. we built nuclear weapons, we contaminated the environment. you need to know that, whether you are thinking about going hiking or sending your kindergartner on a school field trip albert or buying a house next to the site, which is where they are building. three times now that has been defeated. you know, trying to get signs out there. there is a lot of -- as i said earlier there is lot of interest in the part of builders and even the colorado department of health to not put signs up there. if you go out there now, there are no signs. the area that is highly contaminated and it was sealed and capped off his over a ridge, so you can't really see that area. the area is guarded. the rest of it looks -- and this

is what the colorado department of health and department of energy says -- it looks pristine. it is not pristine. obviously. and we can't see plutonium. >> [inaudible question] many people in my neighborhood were extremely sick or die. [inaudible question] >> yes. i understand. there is a lot of construction out there. sometimes people ask, how could you not know about rocky flats or how could you not know what was going on out there? to the present-day people don't know. i was in boulder, colorado, just a few weeks ago. the guy at the front desk of the hotel where i was staying, he was maybe 30 or 35 years old. i told him i was in boulder for a book i had written about rocky flats. and i said you know about rocky

flats? he said no. he had no idea. and he grew up in boulder. so really it has always been the best-kept secret in town. it still is. to a large extent. >> [inaudible question] >> you make comments about fukushima? >> well, i think all of this is connected. i am not just writing about my backyard in our backyard, but it is everyone's backyard. we saw contamination from fukushima in 12 states across the country. it should have been milk and in various things, it is now washing up on the shore. there was contamination from fukushima. it was detected at the rocky flats site. it is very interesting to me when i finished this book last

spring and sent it to my agent and she sent it to publishers, and it was just -- it was by accident, so to speak. fukushima happened. i will never forget that i came home and turned on the television, and everyone on television on cnn and msnbc -- they were all talking about the very things i have been talking about for years with rocky flats. i think that fukushima really brought everything to a head with officials in this country and beyond. i think it has changed the conversation and i think people are much more willing to look at what has happened not only with our nuclear weapons policies and programs, but also with nuclear power and as we consider moving forward into the future. we may be building more. one thing we must take into consideration is the human cost. that is one thing people don't talk about vermont. i don't know of a singular nuclear site that is not

contaminated -- contaminating local neighborhoods and areas. maybe there is one. but i think they have a 100% record on that. are there any other questions? >> thank you so much for being here. [laughter] [applause] [applause] [applause] [applause] >> for more information, visit the author's website kristen iversen.com. here's a look at some books that are being published this week. the only surviving child of winston and clementine churchill, accounting her childhood in world war ii. in a daughter scale. and how washington abandoned main street while rescuing wall street. former inspector general