Category Archives: Engineering Failures

Rocky Flats

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Rocky Flats

Rocky Flats

 What is now is the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge once was the Rocky Flats Plant where triggers for nuclear weapons were manufactured.  The main raw ingredient for the triggers was plutonium, one of the most toxic and radioactive substances known, with a half-life of over 4000 years.  During the forty years the plant operated, there were two major fires in glove boxes where plutonium discs were handled.  In this and other incidents, many pounds of plutonium were released.  The Wikipedia article has an excellent summary and bibliography.   

I was talking to a woman recently about Rocky Flats.  Her father worked there for several years when the plant was in full operation.  He had to deal with a glove box where the plutonium had started to burn.  The gloves were so hot he had to wear other gloves before he could put his hands into the glove box gloves to stop the reaction.  He probably saved some lives.  He died of cancer. 

I became more interested in Rocky Flats after reading Full Body Burden, by Kristin Iverson, an English Professor who grew up in the area.  The book is controversial, disagreeing with the environmental assessments by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  Given all I have read, I am skeptical of the official lint that the area is safe, and exposure to the public was and is minimal.  Decide for yourself. 

Iverson writes that a large area of contaminated topsoil was covered with more topsoil and pronounced safe.  Rocky Flats is aptly named, as millions of tons of glacial erosion products have covered the area with gravel.  The surface is called ground armor, mostly rock, as the high winds in the area have blown much of the finer material away.  That continues, and rodents burrowing bring buried soil to the surface where it blows into the Denver Metro area..  

The nearby Standley Lake, a large irrigation reservoir that provides water to Westminster and Broomfield, allows boating and water skiing but bans swimming because the lake bottom is contaminated with plutonium.  Many experts have advocated banning development in the area, but houses are going up. 

I got interested again recently because the NOAA National Weather Radar website is my go-to means of weather monitoring.  The TV weather people are either warning the apocalypse is imminent or it is fine, no rain, just before a major hailstorm.  Over a period of months I noticed a nearly constant radar image indicating precipitation over the NWR.  Day or night, weekends or weekdays, the image is there.  If it really is rain, the refuge would be a major swamp at the base of the Rocky Mountains.   

Many years ago I was a radar repairman in the Army.  One of the radars we maintained put out so much radio frequency energy it would kill birds flying in front.  We had quite a bit of training about ionizing radiation.  Radars emit radiation, so does decaying plutonium.  I could not come up with any explanation for the radar image other than radioactive decay.  This would be  disastrous, as much of the Denver metro area is downwind of Rocky Flats.   

I sent a number of emails to the NWS, TV stations, and the CDPHE.  I guess I stirred things up a bit, because I got a long, thoughtful letter from CDPHE outlining the investigation I generated.  The conclusion reached is that the radar image is from dust coming from a gravel mining and crushing operation just adjacent to the refuge.   Here is the letter:

Begin forwarded message:

From: “Spreng, Carl” <carl.spreng@state.co.us>
Date: July 13, 2016 at 3:56:58 PM MDT
To: levanks@me.com
Cc: Phillip Peterson – CDPHE <phillip.peterson@state.co.us>, Surovchak Scott <Scott.Surovchak@lm.doe.gov>, “Moritz, Vera” <Moritz.Vera@epa.gov>, Lindsay Masters – CDPHE <lindsay.masters@state.co.us>, Darr Bob <Bob.Darr@lm.doe.gov>, Rob Beierle – CDPHE <robert.beierle@state.co.us>, Smith Warren <warren.smith@state.co.us>
Subject: Rocky Flats

William Shanks

Mr. Shanks,

Your message sent to Phill Peterson in our Radiation Control Program was forwarded to me for response. I discussed your observations with a representative of NOAA. NOAA scientists apparently notice a fairly consistent dust cloud in the Rocky Flats area. This is consistent with the adjacent gravel operations — current and historic. You can observe the dust that rises off these operations as you drive by the site.
During remediation, the source areas of radiological risk in the Central Operable Unit (managed by the US Dept. of Energy) were excavated and shipped out of state. The human health risks inside the Central Operable Unit and the remainder of the site (managed as a refuge by the US Fish and Wildlife Service) were assessed following remediation and risks were found to be very low. A final decision for the site declared that any conceivable use would be appropriate in the Refuge area. That decision was based on an enormous amount of data (surface soil, subsurface soil, groundwater, surface water, air). After the remediation was completed, an aerial survey was conducted using a low-flying helicopter with detectors.
Offsite areas in the vicinity of Rocky Flats are also safe for any use. Numerous offsite surveys confirm the conclusion that only a few samples just east of Rocky Flats detected plutonium concentrations above background levels. You can read more information about the sampling on and around Rocky Flats on the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment’s (CDPHE) web page at:  http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hm/rf/index.htm.
 
Please contact us again if you have more questions.

 

Carl Spreng
P 303.692.3358  |  F 303.759.5355  |  C 303-328-7289
4300 Cherry Creek Drive S, Denver, CO  80246-1530
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Carol Leavenworth <levanks@me.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 5, 2016 at 12:39 PM
Subject: Rocky Flats
To: phillip.peterson@state.co.us

 

Sir,
I notice there is a consistent radar image over the Rocky Flats NWR when viewing the NOAA national weather radar website.  I am no physicist, but ionizing radiation is detectable by radar.  Is this the case at Rocky Flats?  Is there a radiation hazard outside the closed zone?  Is there a public health risk for the nearby residential areas?I was a radar repairman in the Army in the 1960’s and remain interested in the field.  There weren’t many RF energy safeguards back then and there were nuclear weapons stored where I was stationed in Germany.
Thanks.
William Shanks
2032 S. Logan St.
Denver CO 80210
303-830-0599

After Cleanup

After Cleanup

I was skeptical, so I drove out there.  I made a couple of circuits around the area, passing through new subdivisions where grading was going on and decided that was not the source.  I then turned off SH 93, the road from Golden to Boulder into what used to be the west gate to the bomb plant.  I went past lots of no trespassing signs to a big gravel mining and crushing operation.  The crusher was producing a significant dust cloud.  There were lots of big gravel trucks, indicating a major operation.    

I left without getting stopped for trespassing and made another lap around the refuge.  The gravel operation is to the southwest of the refuge, and I could see the dust cloud from north of the refuge.  Mystery solved.  it is not ionizing radiation creating the radar image, it is dust.  

There is no radioactive cloud coming off Rocky Flats.  There is, however, still a lot of radioactive and chemical pollution out there.  I suggest you not buy one of the nice new houses being built in the area..  

Posted in Colorado History, Energy Policy, Engineering Failures, Federal Land, Health Issues, Ionizing Radiation, Plutonium, Radar Images, Stories, Wind

Engineers

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Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, 1940. The engineer commited suicide.

Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse, 1940. The engineer commited suicide.

Engineers design things.  It may be lines of code for a computer application or the Golden Gate Bridge.  They have been at it for a long time.  Stonehenge, the pyramids, Petra, Roman roads, bridges, and aqueducts; all started as an idea in someone’s mind.  He then added the details to make the thing work.   

The details.  You can conceive of a bridge over a stream, but it has to be assembled, stay in one piece, support the loads going over it, and hold back the flood.  It would be nice if it looks good.  In addition it should not cost more than is necessary.  That is asking a lot, and in most cases the product is good at its job.  Think of it, are the stream banks solid rock or mud?  How deep is it, how do you support the bridge as it is being built?  What material to use?  Stone, wood, steel, iron?  What about the approaches?  How do you get the rainwater or snow off?   

Roman Aqueduct

Roman Aqueduct

There are lots of questions to be asked, and the answers have to be backed up by the numbers.    Stress, load, vibration, weather, wind, soil characteristics, and myriad other details have to be calculated.  Calculations can be avoided only if the thing is so overbuilt that little harm can come to it.  It is hard to do stress analysis with Roman numerals, thus things were overbuilt enough that they are still in service today.   

Currently, overbuilding is not an option due to cost considerations.  The thing has to do its job, last for its design life, be easy to work with, and not cost too much.  I spent thirty years in the water treatment business, and everything in the business has engineering behind it.  Most of the time everything works fine.  But, engineers make mistakes.  Walls collapse, processes don’t work, the power to a pump shorts out, the concrete leaks.  When you turn the new thing on, the software may not work.  All the engineering is critical, because the water has to go down the pipe to the customer, safely. 

For thirty years, I treated water using the engineers products.  Sometimes the product was faulty, but we had to make it work anyway.  The net result of this is that after working with the mistakes for so long, I have a deep, strong, profound anti-engineer bias.  In addition, engineers tend to be serious nerds.  They often are weak in social skills, and have difficulty communicating with others.  Lots of them know they are right, and refuse to listen to input from others who are not engineers.  Mistakes get perpetuated.  I must concede, however, that their stuff mostly works. 

The problems can be minor, like not putting the drains in the low spot to forgetting to account for water hammer in a piping system and pipes separate, flooding things.  A big problem we had to deal with was leaking concrete.  Denver Water has been pouring concrete since about 1900.  A lot of experience is in the specifications provided to the contractor building a new plant.  The contractor failed to follow those specifications and water poured out of the filter walls.  Water also came up through the floor from the channel bringing water into the plant.  It was necessary to take the plant out of service, drain the tanks, clean the walls, and coat them with epoxy.  That epoxy will not last as long as the concrete. 

There was one major exception to my dislike for engineers.  The plant where I worked had elements dating back to the 1920s as well as new construction.  Part of the new project was automating the entire plant.  There are lots of valves, motors, pumps, blowers, and other equipment, all interdependent.   

The software developers worked for months writing the programs to run everything.  There were twelve foot diameter valves, 400 horsepower motors, sensors monitoring every process, and it all had to work.

Water Plant Control Room With My Doppleganger

Water Plant Control Room With My Doppleganger

When we turned the plant on for the first time, it worked.  Everything did what it was supposed to.  This in a three hundred million gallons per day water plant.  In contrast, I started up a 10 MGD plant that just barely worked.  The biggest design flaw was a tank that was supposed to even out the water flow coming from the watershed to the water demand of the plant, which tended to fluctuate.  There were valves at the intake up the mountain, at the tank outlet, and at the plant.  The tank was too small to handle the fluctuations.  The plant was either starved for water or the tank was spilling.  There was software to sense tank level and flows, but it could not keep up.  The tank should have been at least twice the size.   

Don’t get me wrong, the work was challenging, interesting, and sometimes even fun.  There was enough variety to keep boredom at bay, and those engineering mistakes added to the challenge.  What the engineers did right, we just took for granted. 

Posted in Engineering Failures, Engineers, My Story, Stories, Water Treatment, Water Treatment Plants