Judge declines to block walking trail near former Rocky Flats grounds

In court papers last week, a federal judge declined to stop construction of a walking trail that environmentalists said could endanger hikers near the demolished Rocky Flats plutonium pit factory in Colorado.

Workers had planned to break ground on parts of a pedestrian bridge and underpass on Sept. 9 and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Sept. 8 said it would not stop those plans. The bridge is part of what is called the Rocky Mountain Greenway Trail.

In a nearly 30-page memorandum, District Judge Timothy Kelly said Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups had not persuaded him that a highly contaminated soil sample collected in 2019, which subsequent testing later revealed as an outlier, was grounds for delaying the Greenway bridge.

In January, Physicians for Social Responsibility and other groups sued the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland and other federal agencies to stop construction of the trail in a rural area outside of Denver.

The plaintiffs wanted DOE to conduct more environmental reviews of the plan, but Kelly said in his Sept. 8 memorandum that DOE, other federal agencies, Colorado’s state government and even the plaintiffs had already conducted independent reviews that failed to turn up more contamination that DOE’s target level for the grounds of the former pit plant.

The plaintiffs built their case in part on a plutonium-contaminated soil sample gathered in 2019 by Bill Ray, then the executive director of Colorado’s Jefferson Parkway Highway Authority, that showed contamination of 264 picocuries per gram (pCi/g).

That was far in excess of the 50 pCi/g level that federal agencies had set as the goal for the remediated Rocky Flats area, but later testing showed that the sample now known as the Bill Ray Particle was, as the CDPHE put it, “a single outlier,” and that the Rocky Flats Grounds, now mostly under the authority of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, were essentially safe for the public.

Federal agencies said that at 50 pCi/g of radiation, which multiple tests of the area have shown is much higher than detectable levels at most publicly accessible parts of the Rocky Flats ground, a worker who spent an 18-year career at the grounds would have an increased cancer risk of one in 133,000, according to Kelly’s Sept. 8 memorandum.

That, the federal government said, was an “acceptable risk,” according to the memo.

Rocky Flats made pits, fissile plutonium cores for nuclear weapons, from the 1950s through the 1980s, milling thousands in a year. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency raided Rocky Flats in 1989 after a two-year probe into mismanagement and misconduct at the DOE facility, to which Rockwell International pleaded guilty.

In 2005, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management certified final remediation of Rocky Flats. Much of the surrounding area was transferred to Fish and Wildlife, but the central grounds of the former plant are still overseen by DOE’s Office of Legacy Management.