Full Body Burden

Several fires recur throughout Full Body Burden. The narrative opens with a house fire at Iversen’s childhood home, caused by a still-lit cigarette igniting the living room curtains. Iversen also details first-person accounts of the 1969 Mother’s Day fire at Rocky Flats, which brings the plant’s activities into the public eye. A 1957 fire at the plant likely causes a nuclear criticality and lingering radioactive elements in the environment for years afterward. As the Iversen family burns their trash at home, Rocky Flats also burns waste in its incinerator, which later investigations show is illegal and the source of radioactive pollution. Before the plant closes, a 2003 plutonium fire threatens the health of workers, including Rocky Flats firefighter Randy Sullivan. Those who fight these fires encounter unstable elements they can’t control, whether those elements are nuclear materials or family dysfunction. 

Through its waste storage practices, Rocky Flats contaminates groundwater with radioactive chemicals. Local bodies of water, including Woman Creek, Walnut Creek, and Standley Lake—where Iversen’s family frequently rides horses—contain pollution. Further, the Great Western Reservoir in nearby Broomfield, Colorado contains tritium, although Rocky Flats officials maintain the water is safe to drink. After they move to Bridledale, Iversen’s father attempts to build a well for the family but cannot; later, he is grateful that the family didn’t ingest polluted groundwater. Their neighbors, the Smiths, use a well for their family members and animals, and their daughter Tamara suffers lifelong health problems including brain tumors. In a study of nuclear weapons plants, the DOE places Rocky Flats at “number one—the most dangerous site in the United States—primarily due to hazardous waste in the groundwater and the large population directly downwind and downstream” (209). 

Rocky Flats’ waste management proves a constant source of conflict at the plant. Plant officials struggle with the storage and disposal of radioactive materials, which contaminate the environment and exceed the official limit of available on-site storage space. Storage methods include solar evaporation ponds, thousands of waste barrels, and cubes of “pondcrete” (171), or liquid waste mixed with concrete. Rocky Flats also illegally burns waste in its incinerator—as revealed during the 1989 FBI raid—and generates over a ton of plutonium that gets lost in ducts and absorbed into the environment. In the 1980s, the plant’s dumpsites in Nevada and Idaho turn away its hazardous waste. The governor of Idaho refuses a boxcar full of waste barrels, leading to a public standoff with the governor of Colorado. The waste issue reveals Rocky Flats’ unwavering commitment to efficiency, superseding both lawfulness and safety: “Facilities like Rocky Flats have to break the law to continue operating. Production cannot stop” (179).