This story is part of an expanded article on sludge I wrote for In These Times. It should be on the newstand this Fall.

The EPA's Slight of Hand: Laundering Radioactive Sludge in Denver

Adrian Anderson was one of only two Metro Wastewater Reclamation District's board members voting to stop a plan to take groundwater contaminated by radioactive leachate from the Lowry Superfund site, run it through a pipeline to the Denver municipal waste treatment system, and spread the radioactive sludge-cake on food crops grown on the city's 41,000 acre disposal site. The pipeline is a convenient way to transfer liability to the public and rid the Department of Energy of a nasty problem. Construction is scheduled to start in the next 60 days.

Lowry was the dumping ground for all of metro Denver's Superfund sites; including the Rocky Mountain Arsenal which produced nerve gas, Martin Marietta's Titan Missile program, and Coors's radioactive waste from their days as nuclear fuel rod makers in weapons facilities. Last month, Anderson was dismissed from the Metro Wastewater board by Denver mayor Wellington Webb. She has a whistleblower case pending in court, where she is seeking protection from harassment and threats as a result of her work to stop the radioactive pollution. She won round one but is appealing a decision by a judge in Long Beach, California challenging her right to whistleblower protection based on her status as a representative for Local 2-477 of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. The local union president, Don Holmstrom, a lawyer and refinery plant operator, is representing Anderson in court.

There are documents which cite radionuclides at the Lowry landfill exist, but the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Region 8 EPA are denying it. An EPA contractor at the Lowry site, CH2M Hill, attributed plutonium readings to "cosmic dust falling from space." In a Freedom of Information Act search, Anderson said an index of records showed 8,800 secret documents related to Lowry. The listing, blackened out because of claims of national security, nevertheless reveals that there was "significant activity to deny the presence of plutonium" at the site. The public record stops in 1991, the last year of former DOE Secretary Federico Pena's 8 year tenure as Denver's mayor. According to Anderson, the EPA is taking advantage of a huge regulatory loophole occasioned by the recategorizing of sludge from a hazardous material to a "beneficial use" material. It is a loophole, says Anderson, "large enough to drive nuclear weapons waste dump trucks through."

In a July 30 meeting, the EPA and the pipeline contractor, Parson's Engineering, denied there is plutonium contamination at Lowry. The meeting, meant to inform concerned citizens about the construction of the pipeline, to the astonishment of members of the audience that came to hear about the collection of Superfund waste in Denver's sewage system, focused on odor control.

Buoyed by public support, organizers are preparing for the next steps, which include injunctions, direct action, a call to the US Attorney General Janet Reno to look at corruption and conflicts of interest in the project, and an investigation of possible criminal activity by the EPA's Region 8 office. If these tactics don't stop the pipeline, it's a one step process to irradiated food, fertilized by Lowry leachate, sold by Cargill Incorporated, and eaten by you and yours and me and mine.

Laura Orlando

ReSource Musings Archive