Plutonium Pancakes - controversy over Colorado plan to sewage sludge that may be radioactive as fertilizer

Progressive, The, May, 2000 by Will Fantle

Fifteen miles from downtown Denver is the sprawling 480-acre site known as the former Lowry Landfill. Between 1950 and 1980, millions of gallons of hazardous industrial wastes were pumped into shallow, unlined pits by the region's powerful corporate and governmental entities.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the Lowry Landfill a Superfund site in 1984. Now the EPA wants to treat the contaminated groundwater at the landfill and discharge it into the Denver metro sewage system. The sewage system could then use the sludge from the treated water to fertilize Colorado farmlands.

Citizens' groups are not happy about that. They say the landfill is widely contaminated with highly radioactive plutonium and other deadly wastes. "This is a plan to legally pump plutonium into the sewer line," says Adrienne Anderson, a lawyer and an instructor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Plutonium is one of the most deadly substances on the planet. A speck, when deposited in the lung, can cause cancer.

Anderson and her students have been digging for the past several years into the vast files amassed by the EPA on the Lowry site. Anderson estimates that she and her students have examined 200,000 documents. In the process, they have uncovered the "smoking gun," she claims. The document, dated December 13, 1991, is entitled "Preliminary Evaluation of Potential Department of Energy Radioactive Wastes." It found that the levels of plutonium and radioactive americium "detected at Lowry Landfill are 10 to 10,000 times greater than the average or maximum background levels reported for Rocky Flats," the notorious nuclear weapons plant near Boulder. This was not a document submitted by some citizens' group. It was hand-delivered in 1991 to the EPA from the Lowry Coalition, the group of corporate and governmental polluters of the site.

These polluters include political heavyweights like Adolph Coors (which once produced nuclear fuel assemblies), Lockheed Martin, the region's two biggest newspapers--the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, Rockwell (the operator of the U.S. Department of Energy's Rocky Flats bomb plant), Conoco, Hewlett Packard, IBM, and Waste Management. Government agencies on the list include the city and county of Denver, the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, and even the EPA, which disposed of pesticides and other lab wastes at the site.

Gwen Hooten, at EPA's Region 8 office in Denver, is in charge of the Lowry cleanup. She and other EPA officials adamantly deny that the site is poisoned by plutonium or other nuclear wastes. "What we have primarily at this site is chemical soup," says Hooten. She dismisses the 1991 document as "unvalidated data." In 1997, the agency released a report by the Denver-based consulting firm CH2M Hill that concluded: "None of these radionuclides could be confirmed present in ground water beneath the site."

The report is largely a reinterpretation of the field data and lab tests gathered between 1987 and 1991. "We did reanalysis," says Hooten. "We reran them in the lab and we got very different results."

Hooten says the EPA told the Lowry Coalition of polluters that "they were premature in their conclusions" about the 1991 document. "Folks want to hang onto this and look at it in a vacuum," she says. EPA'S cleanup plan, she adds, is simply "a target for an activist group looking for a problem."

Critics aren't buying it. Anderson says that the lab operators that did the original testing have "not recanted their analysis. They have never said the plutonium levels were in error. This is in hundreds of samples across the entire site."

Anecdotal evidence suggests that nuclear dumping may have been going on at Lowry.

In 1961, Colorado State Trooper Bill Wilson stopped a milk truck that was spraying liquid on the ground at Lowry. According to Wilson, the truck's operator told him he was dumping radioactive wastewater from the Rocky Flats plant and had the government's permission to do it. Wilson realized he couldn't do anything about it. But he did file reports on identical activities he witnessed for several more years with the state's transportation regulator.

Mary Ulmer grew up next to the Lowry site and still lives nearby. She recalls regular visits to the site by anonymous stainless steel tanker trucks. "It was very common knowledge," she remembers. "The neighbors would just laugh and say, `Oh yeah, they have milk trucks that dump milk out there in the middle of the night.'"

She's now convinced the trucks were spraying radioactive wastes onto the land. "If we could have put the pieces to the puzzle together, it would be so different now," Ulmer says.

Don Holmstrom is a lawyer and the former president of the union that represents the lab workers in Denver's Metro Wastewater Reclamation District (Local 5-477 of the Paper, Allied Industrial Chemical and Energy Workers). He says he's seen records for some waste shipments by Rockwell International to Lowry.

Anderson, who served for a brief period of time on the District's board of directors as a representative for the union, alerted the workers to EPA's plan to pipe wastewater from Lowry into Denver's sewage system. "We felt especially concerned given the fact that this could not only affect Our workers but would impact the community," says Holmstrom.