Full Body Burden Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR FULL BODY BURDEN

  A Mother Jones Best Book of 2012

  A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012

  An Atlantic Monthly Best Book about Justice

  “A deft rebellion against the silences, public and intimate, that have proven disastrous for [Iversen’s] community.”

  —Mother Jones

  “A striking tale of innocence in a time and a place of great danger.”

  —Atlantic.com

  “A shocking and salutary coming-of-age memoir … A meticulously researched and compelling narrative of growing up in the ‘sacrifice’ zone of America’s nuclear weapons programme … One of those rare, life-changing works whose quiet, insistent moral authority commands us to read on and to remember.”

  —Telegraph (UK)

  “An intriguing mix of memoir and first-class investigative journalism … Mad Men meets Erin Brockovich.”

  —Independent (UK)

  “A carefully pruned memoir … [Iversen’s] greatest feat, beyond her clear exposition of decades of scientific mismanagement, is to explain our capacity to ignore what seems too deeply embedded to fix.”

  —Portland Mercury

  “[Iversen’s] book is simultaneously a careful memoir of a haunted childhood and a ferocious interrogation of deliberate environmental and public health neglect, and its slow revelation of family and government secrets has the hypnotic force of a horror story.”

  —Maryn McKenna, Wired.com

  “Intimate … [Iversen’s] blending of fact-based reporting with such narrative warmth is no small achievement.”

  —Salon.com

  “[Iversen’s] writing mixes the lyrical and the logical. This is a real coming-of-age-in-nuclear-America story.… Iversen’s tale joins the growing ranks of what might be termed ‘environmental memoir,’ a genre popularized by a cadre of women directly indebted to Rachel Carson: Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge), Sandra Steingraber (Living Downstream), Nancy Nichols (Lake Effect), and Nancy Langston (Toxic Bodies).”

  —OnEarth

  “Iversen seems to have been destined to write this shocking and infuriating story of a glorious land and a trusting citizenry poisoned by Cold War militarism and ‘hot’ contamination, secrets and lies, greed and denial.… News stories come and go. It takes a book of this exceptional caliber to focus our attention and marshal our collective commitment to preventing future nuclear horrors.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “With meticulous reporting and a clear eye for details, Iversen has crafted a chilling, brilliantly written cautionary tale about the dangers of blind trust.… Full Body Burden is both an engrossing memoir and a powerful piece of investigative journalism.”

  —BookPage

  “What makes this book so powerful is not only this persistent revealing of the truth, but also Iversen’s ability to shift gears from the journalistic and factual to the aesthetic and metaphorical.”

  —Brevity

  “Poignant and gracefully written, Iversen shows us what it meant to come of age next door to Rocky Flats—America’s plutonium bomb factory. The story is at once terrifying and outrageous.”

  —Kai Bird, coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize–winning

  American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  “What a surprise! You don’t expect such (unobtrusively) beautiful writing in a book about nuclear weapons, nor such captivating storytelling. Plus the facts are solid and the science is told in colloquial but never dumbed-down terms.”

  —Mark Hertsgaard, author of Nuclear Inc. and Hot

  “This terrifyingly brilliant book—as perfectly crafted and meticulously assembled as the nuclear bomb triggers that lie at its core—is a savage indictment of the American strategic weapons industry, haunting in its power yet wonderfully, charmingly human as a memoir of growing up in the Atomic Age.”

  —Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and Atlantic

  “Why didn’t Poe or Hitchcock think of this? Full Body Burden has all the elements of a classic horror tale: the charming nuclear family cruising innocently above the undercurrents of nuclear nightmare. But it’s true and all the more chilling.… A gripping and scary story.”

  —Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country

  “A powerful and beautiful account, of great use to all of us who will fight the battles that lie ahead.”

  —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Eaarth

  “Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Full Body Burden is a tale that will haunt your dreams.”

  —John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little

  “This is a subject as grippingly immediate as today’s headlines: While there is alarm about the small rise in radioactivity in the food chain, one reads in these pages about how a whole region lived in the steady contaminating effects of nuclear radiation. Iversen’s prose is clean and clear and lovely, and her story is deeply involving and full of insight and knowledge.… It ought to be required reading for every single legislator in this country.”

  —Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Something Is Out There

  “Kristen Iversen’s ingenious fusion of these two tales—her family’s ongoing denial of her father’s alcoholism with one of the most successful cover-ups in the history of the U.S. military machine—increases the half-life of her story’s power to affect our lives exponentially.… As a Coloradoan, as a U.S. citizen, I can’t imagine a more effective lifting of the shroud of Rocky Flats.”

  —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted and Cowboys Are My Weakness

  “This wonderfully human, deeply engaging and rigorously researched memoir is both a great book and one of the most important books you will ever read. Loving, profound, necessary, beautiful, its message is essential to our happiness and our survival.”

  —Rikki Ducornet, author of Netsuke and The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition

  This is a work of nonfiction. Some of the names have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy. The use of pseudonyms is indicated in the endnotes.

  Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Kristen Iversen

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2013 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  “Extra Libris” and the accompanying colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2012.

  All (66) lines from “Plutonian Ode” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg

  Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg.

  Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Full body burden : growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats / Kristen Iversen.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Iversen, Kristen. 2. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—Environmental aspects. 3. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—History. 4. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—Health aspects. 5. Nuclear weapons plants—Health aspects—Colorado. 6. Plutonium—Health aspects—Colorado. 7. Radioactive waste sites—Cleanup—Colorado. 8. Radioactive pollution—Colorado—Jefferson County. 9. Jefferson County (Colorado)—Biography. I. Iversen, Kristen. II. Title: Growing up in the nuclear shadow of
Rocky Flats.

  TD195.N85I84 2012

  363.17’990978884—dc23 2011045902

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95564-7

  FRONTISPIECE PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT L. TELISCHAK

  COVER DESIGN BY EVAN GAFFNEY

  COVER BACKGROUND IMAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS

  DIVISION, HAER COLO, 30-GOLD. V, 1–8

  v3.1_c1

  For my family: my siblings, Karin, Karma, and Kurt;

  my father; and in loving memory of my mother.

  Most of all, this book is for Sean and Nathan,

  who have lived with it from the beginning.

  I suppose my thinking began to be affected soon after atomic science was firmly established. Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man—he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind were God’s.

  —RACHEL CARSON

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1 Mother’s Day

  1963

  2 Drums and Bunnies

  1969

  3 Nuns and Pirates

  1974

  4 Operation Desert Glow

  1979

  5 A Raid and a Runaway Grand Jury

  1989

  6 Doom with a View

  1990

  7 Fire, Again

  1991–1996

  8 What Lies Beneath

  1996–2011

  Epilogue

  “Plutonian Ode” by Allen Ginsberg

  Acknowledgments

  Rocky Flats Timeline

  Notes

  Extra Libris

  BODY BURDEN: THE AMOUNT

  OF RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL

  PRESENT IN A HUMAN BODY,

  WHICH ACTS AS AN INTERNAL

  AND ONGOING SOURCE OF

  RADIATION

  Plutonium button at Rocky Flats

  It’s 1963 and I’m five. I lie across the backseat of the family car, sleeping with my cheek pressed against the vinyl. My mother sits in the front with baby Karin and my father drives, carefully holding his cigarette just at the window’s edge. This is how I remember my mother and father: smoking in a cool, elegant way that makes me want to grow up quick so I can smoke, too. It’s evening and I’m tired and cranky. The spring day has been spent on a long drive through the Colorado mountains, a Sunday ritual.

  We turn the corner to our home on Johnson Court, the square little house my parents bought when my father left his job as an attorney for an insurance company and set up his own law practice. The neighborhood is made up of winding rows of houses that all look like ours: a front door and a picture window facing the street, two windows on each side, and a sliding door in the back that opens to a postage-stamp backyard. We have a view of the mountains and one tree.

  “Uh-oh,” my mother says.

  “Jesus.” My dad stops the car. I scramble to my knees to look.

  Our house is smoldering. One side is gone. A fire truck and a police car with streaking red lights stand in the driveway.

  My dad jumps out and my mom reaches over and pulls up the parking brake. “Dick,” she says, “I’m taking Kris to the neighbor’s.” My mother is always good in a crisis.

  Mrs. Hauschild is waiting at her door. She takes a pair of pajamas from her daughter’s room—we’re almost the same age—and she beds me down in the basement in a sleeping bag. “She’ll be fine here,” Mrs. Hauschild says. “She doesn’t need to see all that commotion.” She suggests they both have a drink and a cigarette. My mother nods.

  “Someone must have left the lamp on in Kris’s bedroom,” my mother says as they walk up the stairs. “The drapes caught on fire.”

  I repeat these words in my head until I come to believe I set the fire myself. I can still picture my bedside lamp, the brass switch, the round orange globe always warm to the touch.

  Years later—decades, in fact—my father laughs when I tell him this story. “You didn’t cause that fire, Kris,” he says. “Your mother and I did. We had been sitting and talking in the living room, having a drink together, and we left a burning cigarette in the ashtray. Neither of us noticed. The drapes in the living room caught fire first.” The flames never reached my room.

  This is how I want to remember my parents: still talking to each other, even when the world was tumbling down around their ears.

  WE RENT a basement apartment for a month and then move back to our rebuilt house. Nothing is ever said about the fire. Nothing is ever said about dark or sad or upsetting events, and anything that involves liquor is definitely not discussed. My parents are elegant drinkers. My mother can make a Manhattan with just the right splash of whiskey and vermouth. My father takes his bourbon straight on ice. After dinner, once my mother has tucked us into bed, my parents make cocktails and play cribbage to determine who has to do the dishes. From my bedroom I can hear my mother’s soft laugh. Sometimes there’s a stack of unwashed plates in the sink when we leave for school in the morning.

  Soon another baby is born: my sister Karma. This is not a hippie name, despite the fact that we live close to Boulder. My mother insists on naming her daughters after her Norwegian heritage: Kristen, Karin, Karma.

  At the top of the hill behind our house stands the Arvada cemetery. The year 1863 is etched in a stone marker at the entrance. The cemetery works like a magnet. As soon as our mother puts us out into the yard for the afternoon—just like the kids and grandkids on the family farm back in Iowa, who were expected to fend for themselves for the day—Karin and I scramble over the fence and head for the hill. We are our own secret club, and Karma joins us as soon as she is old enough to toddle along. Sometimes the other neighbor girls—Paula, Susie, and Kathy—are allowed into the club as temporary members. We trek across the field behind the row of backyards and through the old apple orchard and get up to the creek, where we balance a flat plank across the shallow, sluggish water and tiptoe across. Water spiders dance across the surface and tiny minnows scatter when we push our toes into the muddy bottom.

  At the crest of the hill stand row after row of headstones. Some are tall, others flat against the ground. Some have the names of children or images of their faces etched in the stone, and we stay away from those. We run up and down the rows, shrieking and gathering up the plastic flowers. We pile all our flowers in the middle and sit in a circle around them. We look down the hill to our house and imagine our mother, big and round, lying on her bed and waiting for the next baby, a boy at last, she’s sure of it. A little farther, we can see the Arvada Villa Pizza Parlor and the Arvada Beauty Academy. Between our neighborhood and the long dark line of mountains stands a single white water tower, all by itself. The Rocky Flats water tower. There is a hidden factory there.

  That hidden factory is the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, a foundry that smelts plutonium, purifies it, and shapes it into plutonium “triggers” for nuclear bombs. The plant also recycles fissionable material from outmoded bombs. A largely blue-collar link in the U.S. government’s nuclear bomb network, Rocky Flats is the only plant in the country that produces these triggers—small, spherical explosives that provide an atomic bomb’s chain reaction. The triggers form the heart of every nuclear weapon made in America. From 1952 to 1989, Rocky Flats manufactures more than seventy thousand plutonium triggers, at a cost of nearly $4 million apiece. Each one contains enough breathable particles of plutonium to kill every person on earth.

  Rocky Flats’ largest output, however, is radioactive and toxic waste. In all the decades of nuclear weapons production, the nuclear weapons industry produces waste with too little thought to the future or the environment. The creation of each gram of plutonium produces radioac
tive waste, virtually all of which remains with us to the present day.

  But no one in our community knows what goes on at Rocky Flats. This is a secret operation, not subject to any laws of the state.

  The wind blows, as it always does. I imagine the bones of pioneers and cowboys beneath our feet. The chill of evening begins to creep up the hill; the air turns cold when the sun dips.

  “Let’s go!” Karin yells, and we jump to our feet and roll and tumble down the hill. We bounce across the plank and race across the field, full speed, before the sun sets and the ghosts come out.

  IN THE beginning, Rocky Flats is called Project Apple. In 1951, years before I’m born, a group of men from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) meet in an old hotel off the beaten track in Denver. No press, no publicity. Their job is to find a site to build a secret bomb factory that will carry out the work that first began with the Manhattan Project, the covert military endeavor that developed the first atomic bomb during World War II.

  Until now, all nuclear bombs in the United States have been custom-built at the weapons research and design laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, with materials supplied from the plutonium production facility at the Hanford site in eastern Washington State and the uranium enrichment facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. But with the heightening Cold War—a high state of military tension and political conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies that will continue for decades—the United States wants to mass-produce nuclear weapons. They need a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-down-to-business, high-production bomb factory. An assembly line.

  AEC officials choose a site on a high, windy plateau not far from the growing cities of Arvada, Boulder, and Denver—cities that can provide workers and housing. Landowners are forced to sell their land to the government, and construction on Project Apple begins immediately.