Authors: Kristen Iversen
Full Body Burden (53 page)
On March 11, 2011, following a level 9.0 earthquake and consequent tsunami, the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan led to the release of large amounts of radioactive material into the air and into the ocean. It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. More than 100,000 Japanese residents in surrounding communities were forced to flee.
Throughout
Japan, radioactive substances were found not only in beef, milk, spinach, and tea leaves, but also in rice, an essential part of the Japanese diet. In the United States, special monitors deployed for a short time by the EPA following the accident picked up reportedly low levels of radiation from Japan all along the California, Oregon, and Washington coastline. More than a dozen cities in the United States tested positive for fallout from Fukushima in their water supplies. Scientists found radiation from Japan in milk from Arizona to Arkansas to Vermont.
Japanese officials downplayed the accident. Initially assessed as Level Four on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), the accident was raised to Level Five and eventually to Level Seven, the highest on the INES.
Skeptics in Japan and abroad accused the government of “a consistent pattern of official lying, foot-dragging and concealment.”
At an antinuclear protest in Tokyo on September 19, 2011, attended by sixty thousand people, Fukushima resident Ruiko Muto compared the people of Fukushima to
hibakusha
, the name for survivors of the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. “Day after day, many inescapable decisions were forced upon us. To flee, or not to flee? To eat, or not to eat? To make our children wear masks, or not to make them? To speak out, or to remain silent?” she asked. Many of the
hibakusha
have long been opposed to nuclear weapons, but because the Japanese government maintained that nuclear weapons and nuclear power were two separate and unrelated issues, few Japanese have opposed nuclear power plants. By the fall of 2011, that had changed.
Next to Fukushima and Chernobyl, the explosion in 1957 of the underground nuclear waste tank at the Mayak plant, near Kyshtym, Russia, is considered the third-worst nuclear disaster in history, and it reveals the same troubling pattern of government silence and misinformation. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl, classified as a Level Seven on the INES, caused the evacuation of 135,000 people and the release of radioactive material four hundred times higher than what had been released by the Hiroshima bomb.
It was only after radiation levels set off alarms in Sweden that Soviet officials allowed publicly that a disaster had occurred.
At Fukushima, a twelve-mile exclusion zone for the most highly contaminated land remains in place around the plant, and officials are considering further expansion of this zone.
The estimated cost to clean up the “vast areas” contaminated by the Fukushima accident is at least $13 billion. The accident at Chernobyl contaminated approximately 100,000 square kilometers (roughly 62,000 square miles) with fallout, and levels of contamination were detected all over Europe. At Mayak, hundreds of square miles around the plant are uninhabitable. Today Mayak reprocesses waste from foreign nuclear reactors for profit.
In the United States we currently have approximately 25,000 plutonium pits in our stockpile: roughly 10,000 in nuclear warheads, 5,000 in “strategic reserve,” and more than 10,000 “surplus” pits at the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas. When production was halted at Rocky Flats after the 1989 FBI raid, the DOE lost the ability to produce plutonium pits. During its production years, Rocky Flats produced more than 1,800 pits per year. In 1998, nine years after the raid,
the production of plutonium pits began again at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with only a few pits produced per year. The DOE says that aging plutonium pits may be unreliable and new pit production is necessary to maintain our stockpile—although many specialists believe plutonium pits are stable for at least half a century, and recent studies suggest an even longer shelf life. Nonetheless, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) currently seeks to build a modern pit facility capable of producing 450 or more pits per year. Total construction cost of this facility is estimated at more than $2 billion. So far, NNSA has failed to gain full congressional support.
Many inescapable decisions have been forced upon us—decisions about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy that will have far-reaching consequences with sometimes dangerous and unintended results. To speak out or to remain silent is the first and most crucial decision we can make.
by ALLEN GINSBERG
I
What new element before us unborn in nature? Is there a new thing under the Sun?
At last inquisitive Whitman a modern epic, detonative, Scientific theme
First penned unmindful by Doctor Seaborg with poisonous hand, named for Death’s planet through the sea beyond Uranus
whose chthonic ore fathers this magma-teared Lord of Hades, Sire of avenging Furies, billionaire Hell-King worshipped once
with black sheep throats cut, priest’s face averted from underground mysteries in a single temple at Eleusis,
Spring-green Persephone nuptialed to his inevitable Shade, Demeter mother of asphodel weeping dew,
her daughter stored in salty caverns under white snow, black hail, grey winter rain or Polar ice, immemorable seasons before
Fish flew in Heaven, before a Ram died by the starry bush, before the Bull stamped sky and earth or Twins inscribed their memories in clay or Crab’d flood
washed memory from the skull, or Lion sniffed the lilac breeze in Eden—
Before the Great Year began turning its twelve signs,
ere constellations wheeled for twenty-four thousand sunny years
slowly round their axis in Sagittarius, one hundred sixty-seven thousand times returning to this night
Radioactive Nemesis were you there at the beginning black Dumb tongueless unsmelling blast of Disillusion?
I manifest your Baptismal Word after four billion years
I guess your birthday in Earthling Night, I salute your dreadful presence lasting majestic as the Gods,
Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light,
Sophia’s reflections glittering thoughtful galaxies, whirlpools of starspume silver-thin as hairs of Einstein!
Father Whitman I celebrate a matter that renders Self oblivion!
Grand Subject that annihilates inky hands & pages’ prayers, old orators’ inspired Immortalities,
I begin your chant, openmouthed exhaling into spacious sky over silent mills at Hanford, Savannah River, Rocky Flats, Pantex, Burlington, Albuquerque
I yell thru Washington, South Carolina, Colorado, Texas, Iowa, New Mexico,
where nuclear reactors create a new Thing under the Sun, where Rockwell war-plants fabricate this death stuff trigger in nitrogen baths,
Hanger-Silas Mason assembles the terrified weapon secret by ten thousands, & where Manzano Mountain boasts to store
its dreadful decay through two hundred forty millennia while our Galaxy spirals around its nebulous core.
I enter your secret places with my mind, I speak with your presence, I roar your Lion Roar with mortal mouth.
One microgram inspired to one lung, ten pounds of heavy metal dust adrift slow motion over grey Alps
the breadth of the planet, how long before your radiance speeds blight and death to sentient beings?
Enter my body or not I carol my spirit inside you, Unapproachable Weight,
O heavy heavy Element awakened I vocalize your consciousness to six worlds
I chant your absolute Vanity. Yeah monster of Anger birthed in fear O most
Ignorant matter ever created unnatural to Earth! Delusion of metal empires!
Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous Generals, Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars!
Judgement of judgements, Divine Wind over vengeful nations, Molester of Presidents, Death-Scandal of Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly industrious!
Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate! Manufactured Spectre of human reason! O solidified imago of practitioners in Black Arts
I dare your Reality, I challenge your very being! I publish your cause and effect!
I turn the Wheel of Mind on your three hundred tons! Your name enters mankind’s ear! I embody your ultimate powers!
My oratory advances on your vaunted Mystery! This breath dispels your braggart fears! I sing your form at last
behind your concrete & iron walls inside your fortress of rubber & translucent silicon shields in filtered cabinets and baths of lathe oil,
My voice resounds through robot glove boxes & ingot cans and echoes in electric vaults inert of atmosphere,
I enter with spirit out loud into your fuel rod drums underground on soundless thrones and beds of lead
O density! This weightless anthem trumpets transcendent through hidden chambers and breaks through iron doors into the Infernal Room!
Over your dreadful vibration this measured harmony floats audible, these jubilant tones are honey and milk and wine-sweet water
Poured on the stone block floor, these syllables are barley groats I scatter on the Reactor’s core,
I call your name with hollow vowels, I psalm your Fate close by, my breath near deathless ever at your side
to Spell your destiny, I set this verse prophetic on your mausoleum walls to seal you up Eternally with Diamond Truth! O doomed Plutonium.
The Bard surveys Plutonian history from midnight lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps till in dawn’s early light
he contemplates a tranquil politic spaced out between Nations’ thought-forms proliferating bureaucratic
& horrific arm’d, Satanic industries projected sudden with Five Hundred Billion Dollar Strength
around the world same time this text is set in Boulder, Colorado before front range of Rocky Mountains
twelve miles north of Rocky Flats Nuclear Facility in United States of North America, Western Hemisphere
of planet Earth six months and fourteen days around our Solar System in a Spiral Galaxy
the local year after Dominion of the last God nineteen hundred seventy eight
Completed as yellow hazed dawn clouds brighten East, Denver city white below
Blue sky transparent rising empty deep & spacious to a morning star high over the balcony
above some autos sat with wheels to curb downhill from Flatiron’s jagged pine ridge,
sunlit mountain meadows sloped to rust-red sandstone cliffs above brick townhouse roofs
as sparrows waked whistling through Marine Street’s summer green leafed trees.
This ode to you O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people,
you present meditators, spiritual friends & teachers, you O Master of the Diamond Arts,
Take this wheel of syllables in hand, these vowels and consonants to breath’s end
take this inhalation of black poison to your heart, breathe out this blessing from your breast on our creation
forests cities oceans deserts rocky flats and mountains in the Ten Directions pacify with this exhalation,
enrich this Plutonian Ode to explode its empty thunder through earthen thought-worlds
Magnetize this howl with heartless compassion, destroy this mountain of Plutonium with ordinary mind and body speech,
thus empower this Mind-guard spirit gone out, gone out, gone beyond, gone beyond me, Wake space, so Ah!
—July 14, 1978
I
HAVE
many people to thank in the process of researching this book, including neighbors, old classmates, scientists, Rocky Flats workers, activists, attorneys, journalists, physicians, and developers. In addition to the many interviews I conducted myself, I depended heavily on the remarkable archive of Rocky Flats interviews at the Maria Rogers Oral History Program at the Carnegie Library in Boulder, Colorado, where I owe special thanks to Dorothy Ciarlo, Hannah Nordhaus, and Susan Becker. Thanks to J. Wendel Cox and Jennifer Dewey at the Denver Public Library, Western History and Genealogy department, and David M. Hays at the University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, Archives department.
I am grateful to all of the people who granted me interviews and were very generous with their time. Particular thanks go to workers Randy Sullivan, Stan Skinger, Charlie Wolf, Doug Parker, Laura and Jeff Schultz, Dr. Robert Rothe, and Debby Clark. Charlie Wolf is missed by many. Neighbors and residents include Tamara Smith Meza and her family (as well as physician Nicholas Gonzales); Ann White; the Kirstin Dunn family; Stacy Gardalen (née Bunce), Curtis Bunce, and Patricia Bunce; Bini Abbott; and the Duane Hart family. Dr. LeRoy Moore with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center was an invaluable resource and I am deeply grateful for his assistance. Thanks to Representative Wes McKinley; Dr. Harvey Nichols, professor emeritus of biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder; and Len Ackland, author of
Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West
. Attorney Peter Nordberg and his wife, Mykaila, shared remarkable stories, and I am grateful to Karen Markert for her assistance with court documentation. Peter Nordberg is deeply missed. Thanks to those who have been involved in the Rocky Flats story in so many ways and shared their
stories: Patrick Malone, Shirley Garcia, Hildegard Hix, Mary Harlow, Jack Cohen-Joppa, Pam Solo, Judy Danielson, Paula Elofson-Gardine, Anne Guilfoile, Ellen Klaver, Bob McFarland, Chet Tchozewski, Kenneth Nova, Elene Rosenfeld, Jyoti Wind, and Bob Kinsey. Thanks to Rex Haag and particularly Charles C. McKay, who shared stories of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Thanks to investigative journalists Ryan Ross, Eileen Welsome, and Patricia Calhoun. I am grateful to my dear friend Christie Smith, who sent useful newspaper clippings for years, and Theron Britt for helpful commentary. Alex Stein offered insightful comments and unflagging faith that I would finish this project. Marge and Joe Meek were ever supportive of this work. Warm gratitude to Roberta and Rick Robertson. Photographer Arin Billings shared her remarkable photographs of Rocky Flats workers, and I continue to be inspired by the photography of Robert Del Tredici as well as by Robert Adams and his photos of people living near Rocky Flats.