WASHINGTON, D.C. — Despite one soil sample that showed an elevated level of radioactive contamination, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) thinks land near the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant poses no significant threat to people.
“Our state experts and toxicologists do not believe there is any immediate threat to public health,” Jennifer Opila, director of the CDPHE Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division, said here Nov. 21.
The agency has been monitoring the situation since August, when the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority reported a soil sample on the right-of-way area for a new 10-mile toll road exceeded the level of 50 picocuries per gram, which would be considered to pose potential risk to human health.
But other soil samples, taken both before and after that sample was reported, are all well within human safety standards, Opila told a meeting of the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.
The highway authority has resampled the area since it discovered the elevated sample, and by mid-December expects to provide the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment with more than 200 additional soil samples taken around what is now the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge.
The state agency expects to analyze the data by April, Opila said. “We acknowledge there will always be some contamination there,” but not at levels high enough to endanger health, she said.
Rocky Flats produced the fissile plutonium cores for nuclear weapons from 1952 until 1989. The U.S. Department of Energy in 2005 certified it had completed the $7 billion remediation of the site.
In September, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a soil sampling report from the area of planned hiking trails at the refuge, which concluded contamination does not pose a risk to hikers or local residents. Prior studies taken in the 1990s and early 2000s showed no elevated risk of diseases or cancer near the Rocky Flats site, between Denver and Boulder, Opila said.
