No human had worked here for 40 years, but Ricky Mote felt ready. He layered on four sets of safety boots and three pairs of gloves and squeezed the rest of his body into two airtight moon suits. Just in case, an ambulance waited.
Mote expected some danger while digging up 171 drums of uranium from a trench at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.
What he didn't expect, though, was exploding green goo.
In one of the first jobs of the $7.7 billion Rocky Flats cleanup - the most massive public-works project in the history of Colorado and the first of its kind on Earth - Mote motioned a co-worker in a backhoe, Jeff Herring, to scoop out an unmarked barrel.
The black drum was rotted, and some lime-green sludge, loaded with uranium, oozed out. Mote edged closer for a look.
Suddenly: Fire!
Mote leapt backward from the blue flash and waved for help. Joe Fanning, another worker in a moon suit, jumped ahead with his brass shovel.
One dump of sand and the uranium fire was out. But the crew was shaken.
'I just about pooped myself,' Mote said of the August 1998 flash fire.
At Rocky Flats, it was one drum down, 1,099,956 to go.
In the next six years, the U.S. government plans to turn Rocky Flats, one of the world's most fearsome and filthy nuclear bomb factories, into 6,000 acres of hiking and biking trails and light industry 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver.
With little public attention, the top-secret complex has trucked out an estimated 600 plutonium pits, key weapon parts that each carry the killing power of a Hiroshima bomb, down Interstate 25 in Denver to another government facility in Texas.
A former plutonium lab has been reduced to a concrete slab, and 4,060 gallons of volatile plutonium solutions have been drained from leaking pipes and tanks. Another 30 tons of depleted uranium has been unearthed from outdoor trenches by $20-an-hour workers such as Mote, Fanning and Herring.
All that was the easy part.
Now the U.S. government is pushing ahead to do something at Rocky Flats that has never been done anywhere: detoxify a nuclear bomb plant.
Among the challenges:
Finding 1,100 pounds of plutonium that somehow became lost in ductwork, drums and industrial gloveboxes. The amount of missing plutonium at Rocky Flats is enough to build 150 Nagasaki-strength bombs.
Cleaning 13 'infinity rooms' - places so radioactive that instruments go off the scale when measurements are attempted. One infinity room is so bad that managers welded its door shut in 1972. Another room was stuffed with plutonium-fouled machinery and then entombed in concrete.
Trucking out dangerous materials. In the next two years, an estimated 16,000 pounds of high-grade plutonium must be moved through metro Denver to South Carolina. On top of that, to meet the planned 2006 cleanup completion date, Rocky Flats must ship out more than three truckloads of radioactive waste each day; the plant now moves only two truckloads a week.
Controlling costs. Cleanup delays at Rocky Flats would cost taxpayers $2 million a day. The project already is two years behind schedule, though cleanup managers express confidence they'll soon catch up. The government expects to spend nearly twice as much to raze Rocky Flats as it spent to build Denver International Airport.
Protecting workers and neighbors. Cleanup workers are opening contaminated drums and pipes that haven't been handled for four decades. The result: Employee radiation doses have been climbing. The main cleanup contractor was fined $41,250 last month after a demolition worker suffered a heavy radiation dose from a finger cut while taking apart a plutonium furnace.
The cleanup carries import far outside Colorado. With dozens of old Cold War weapons factories awaiting decontamination in the United States, the former Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France, Rocky Flats is a key test case for the world's nuclear cleanup industry.
'Rocky Flats is the flagship site in demonstrating tangible and significant progress toward safe closure of former nuclear weapons production sites,' said U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department is managing the cleanup. 'The safe closure of Rocky Flats by 2006 is a top priority.'
Much information about Rocky Flats still is classified by the government as top secret. To tell how the 700-building complex became so contaminated - and how it will be decontaminated - The Denver Post interviewed dozens of workers, reviewed thousands of pages of records and toured bomb-making buildings that remain protected by anti-aircraft guns, foot-thick vaults and guards with submachine guns.
'Most dangerous building' just part of the task Put simply, Rocky Flats is a mess.
One highly polluted bomb building, the size of three football fields, was described in 1994 as the most dangerous building in America. Another was so heavily contaminated by a plutonium fire that engineers finally quit trying to clean it and instead built a false ceiling to entrap the splattered radioactivity above workers' heads. At an outdoor pad that once stored 5,200 drums of radioactive waste, an underground plume of plutonium, oil and carcinogenic industrial solvents is seeping downhill.
Nobody envisioned such major pollution problems on March 23, 1951, when the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the nation was building a top-secret nuclear weapons plant in a rocky but flat ranching area of Jefferson County. The Denver Post heralded the government decision with a front-page headline: 'There's good news today.' The story ran next to a Korean War photo with the headline: '20,000 Reds Flee Yank Paratroopers.'
By the time the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik into space in 1957, Rocky Flats had become the linchpin in the nation's nuclear bomb system.
Rocky Flats took plutonium, made by other government plants or recycled from old warheads in the field, and turned it into one of the most highly engineered devices ever made by man - plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear bombs.
A hollow sphere that varies in size from a grapefruit to a soccer ball, a plutonium pit explodes with the power of a Hiroshima bomb. During World War II, that was enough to kill 140,000 people.
But in today's nuclear arsenal, the pit serves mainly as a starter that ignites the final firepower of a thermonuclear weapon; a pit is the compact A-bomb that detonates the overall H-bomb. In modern warheads, Rocky Flats pits set off weapons 600 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb, which itself was the explosive equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT.
According to declassified reports, the government made about 70,000 pits while Rocky Flats operated from 1953 to 1989. That's equal to five pits a day.
Elaborate security system costs $55 million a year
It's hard to walk through the inner reaches of Rocky Flats today without feeling at least a little unnerved. In the coldest days of the Cold War, up to 8,000 workers entered here 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to build the most deadly devices ever invented.
Visitors must pass through as many as four security stops before entering any classified section of the bomb complex. Rocky Flats spends $55 million a year on security, an amount that exceeds the annual budget for every police and sheriff's department in Colorado except Denver.
At the first Rocky Flats checkpoint, to protect against terrorist suicide missions, guards with submachine guns swab dust from the steering wheels and doors of visiting cars to check for explosives residue.
The second checkpoint is staffed by more armed guards, who screen visitors with metal detectors and scan fingers and palms with a computer that matches handprints with government records. Most people who proceed through this guard station already have received a top-secret 'Q' clearance, which requires a full investigation of at least the past 10 years of their personal lives.
A third checkpoint just outside a plutonium building screens the visitor's necklace of five or so security badges to make sure the person is allowed inside. Some buildings also post a fourth security station, where more guards with submachine guns check visitor badges behind a portal of bulletproof glass and 4-inch-thick metal doors.
The perimeter of the 385-acre pit production area is surrounded by two razor-wire fences, security cameras and prison-like watchtowers with more armed guards. To foil helicopter landings, anti-aircraft guns are stationed on the roofs of several buildings.
If all the outdoor security feels spooky, it's just a prelude for what lies inside the plutonium buildings. And one place looms largest in Rocky Flats lore - Building 771.
'It's known as the Hole. It's the worst damn building in the whole complex,' said Tony DeMaiori, who has worked at the complex for 20 years.
A windowless two-story concrete structure dug into a hillside in 1951, Building 771 was the world's first factory-sized plutonium processing plant. Almost every nuclear weapon ever made by the United States started here.
It was not clean work.
Building 771 took scraps of plutonium, or tainted plutonium from old warheads, and recycled it into gray buttons, or ingots, roughly the size of a hockey puck. Purifying the plutonium required vast amounts of nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrogen fluoride and caustics.
Almost all work was done inside the building's 217 gloveboxes, aquarium-like containers that ranged in size from one minivan to three Winnebagos. Each glovebox was outfitted with several pairs of elbow-length gloves, made of rubber and lead, which protected workers' hands from radiation while handling plutonium.
With 147,900 square feet of cauldrons, precipitators, furnaces and a giant incinerator, Building 771 helped win the Cold War by turning hundreds of retired old pits into powerful new ones.
But the same chemicals that liquefied and purified plutonium also ate through overhead plumbing.
The result: Leak after leak after leak.
'Occasionally you'd feel a drip on your head and you'd be contaminated with plutonium nitrate,' DeMaiori said.
In the vocabulary of Rocky Flats, contamination was 'crap.' Workers sprayed with radioactivity were 'crapped up.' Workers sprayed with so much radioactivity that they exceeded the government's annual dose limits - and were forced out of plutonium areas and into desk-job assignments - were 'crapped out.'
Jim Kelly, who worked 23 years in Building 771, said his worst moment came when co-workers heaving a drum of plutonium waste into the incinerator accidentally dropped it down his back.
'They dumped a barrel of crap on me. Oh, it was a hellhole to work in,' he said.
'771 was a building that was feared, and the reason was leaks - leaks from the pipes, leaks from the valves, leaks from the boxes. There were incidents there every day, every week, every year that I worked there.
'There was always tape or plastic on something to stop the leaks. It looked like a building that had 5 million Band-Aids slapped on it.'
Still, workers kept coming back to the Hole. One reason was the terrific camaraderie forged by terrible working conditions. Another reason was 'hot pay.'
When Kelly started work in 1956, hot pay was an extra dime an hour on top of the $2 standard wage. Today the top rank-and-file decontamination workers make $20 an hour, or $30 per hour for time in a moon suit with an oxygen tank.
With hot pay comes risk. Al Williams remembers working with his arms deep in a glovebox when he felt some warmth on his leg.
It was leaking plutonium solution.
'There was a hole in the box,' Williams said. 'Things were different in the old days.'
John Goodnow doesn't even know when he was contaminated. After finishing a routine inspection of a plutonium tank-draining area, he got ready to leave for the locker room.
Then a co-worker with a radiation meter found something on Goodnow's safety bootie.
'You can't see it or feel it or taste it or smell it, but it was there,' Goodnow said. 'I must have just walked across something.'
His dose was small and is not expected to pose any health problems. But another Building 771 employee, Don Gable, died of brain cancer at age 31, in 1980, after working part of every day with his head 6 inches from a plutonium nitrate pipe. The government lost the dead man's brain before an autopsy could check for radiation.
One storage tank area was so plagued with leaks that workers called it the 'snake pit' and dreaded the shifts when they were assigned to clean it.
And then there was Room 141, which contained a pump that squirted so often that low areas in the floor sometimes flooded with 2 inches of plutonium nitrate. Cleanup crews managed to drain the room but then stopped work after failing to reduce radioactivity below the level that reads 'infinity' on standard plant instruments.
The door finally was welded shut in 1972, creating a radioactive time capsule that has gone unvisited by any person since the days of Watergate and Archie Bunker's 'All in the Family.' Room 141 was abandoned so quickly that a peek through the window today shows a jackhammer still stuck in the floor.
That was an accidental spill. Sometimes workers spilled plutonium on purpose to prevent even bigger trouble.
During complex chemical operations, so much plutonium nitrate dripped onto the bottom of gloveboxes that workers faced the risk of criticality - an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that sprayed a deadly stream of neutrons.
To prevent criticality, workers did the nuclear equivalent of pulling the plug on a bathtub. They used a 'crit valve' to dump plutonium nitrate from the glovebox to the factory floor. That prevented a criticality disaster from ever occurring at Rocky Flats.
'When you got more than 2 inches of liquid in a box, you'd have a choice - you either have a criticality, or you have a cleanup job,' said Don Sabac, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961. 'You always chose the cleanup job.'
For a worker, that meant dropping to his or her hands and knees and scrubbing the plutonium solution off the floor with industrial cleanser, called K.W., and strengthened paper towels called Kimwipes.
That didn't always work. Acids in plutonium solutions often ate through concrete floors or walls and prevented a thorough cleanup. So workers painted over dozens of radioactive areas with purple or brown epoxy.
Paint could seal off nuclear spills, but it took more than that to clean up after fires.
Plutonium shavings can catch on fire just by being piled in the wrong shape or being exposed to the wrong chemical. At Rocky Flats, the wrong thing happened a lot.
From 1953 to 1990, workers reported 430 fires at Building 771 alone.
The biggest started Sept. 11, 1957, when shavings spontaneously ignited in a glovebox network containing 93 pounds of plutonium. The 10:10 p.m. fire had consumed the protective Plexiglas and gloves, the official 'incident' report said, when Ted Eckert arrived.
'The fire's out! Stop the water!' workers shouted to Eckert from inside Room 180.
Eckert ran down the hall to tell others to turn off the water. Then - boom! - the building rocked.
The explosion nearly knocked Eckert off his feet and two other firefighters, Bob Vandegrift and V.F. Eminger, through a closed metal door.
'It's blown up! Get out!' shouted Bruce Owen from inside the room.
'We'd better get out of here,' Eckert told Floid Parker as they ran for their lives.
Workers fled outside and looked up the building's 150-foot smokestack. A dense black smoke plume, filled with sparks, rose 100 feet above Jefferson County.
It took 13 hours to put out the fire, which spackled undisclosed amounts of plutonium throughout the inside of the building.
Though most contamination was removed during an eight-month scrubdown, some simply was painted over and is awaiting cleanup today.
And that wasn't even the plant's most destructive blaze.
On Mother's Day 1969, a plutonium briquette spontaneously ignited in a neighboring Rocky Flats facility, Building 776, and spread what at that time was the worst industrial fire in U.S. history.
'The fire was out of the top of the (foundry) with flames about 18 inches high. One of the two firemen heard two loud reports (like rifle shots) and saw two fireballs (about basketball size) go to the ceiling,' said the government report on the fire. 'The firefighters reported seeing burning plutonium erupt with showers of sparks when hit with water.'
The fire, which caused $200 million in damage in today's dollars, was extinguished after four hours. So much water was used to douse the Building 776 blaze that it flowed downhill through a fortified 267-foot tunnel to Building 771, where some rooms were soaked in a radioactive flood.
Workers such as Jim DeAndrea, a 41-year Rocky Flats veteran, spent the next two years trying to scrub away the radioactivity.
'I put on my three pairs of coveralls and full face mask and hood and went crawling through the ducts on my back with a sponge, just wiping it down the best I could,' DeAndrea said. "I was working in infinity,' he said, referring to the reading on the radiation meters along the 3-foot-by-4-foot metal shafts.
Inside the ducts, DeAndrea felt his finger pinched on a ragged edge of sheet metal. That simple snag was enough to contaminate him.
Safety officials tried to wash off DeAndrea's radiation with cold water, but that didn't work. Neither did rubbing him raw with a coarse brush or scrubbing him in Clorox bleach.
So plant medical workers pulled out a scalpel and scraped off layer after layer of skin on DeAndrea's hand until the radiation meters finally said it was safe.
Like many Rocky Flats workers, DeAndrea emerged from the painful decontamination ready to get right back on the job.
'We were fighting the Cold War. I'm proud that we worked hard and did it well and nobody got killed,' DeAndrea said.
The fire in one Rocky Flats building temporarily blocked an entire superpower's bomb-making operations. Fearful that the American delay might let the Soviets pull ahead in the nuclear arms race, Rocky Flats managers pushed hard to resume weapons production.
Cleanup from the 1969 fire never was completed.
'When the gloveboxes were breached by the fire, contamination spread everywhere - in the floor and overhead,' said David DelVecchio, who worked in Building 776 for 31/2 years. 'A false ceiling was installed because they couldn't get all the contamination out of the original ceiling.'
Some equipment in Building 776 was so radioactive that workers hauled it into Room 127, stacked it into an 8-by-10-foot block and sealed it all in 18 inches of concrete.
In six more years, that concrete tomb - and everything else at Rocky Flats - is supposed to be gone.
It won't be easy.
Lost plutonium
must be recovered
From March 1997 to June 1999, thousands of pounds of plutonium pits were trucked from Rocky Flats to the federal Pantex facility near Amarillo, Texas. The exact number of pits remains classified, but Energy Department officials confirmed that all were moved out. Nuclear weapons expert Tom Cochran, consulting with declassified government databases and other information assembled by the Natural Resources Defense Council, estimated the plant trucked 600 pits to Texas.
While the weapon parts are gone, many plutonium slivers, dust specks and drips remain.
According to the government's last declassified report, from 1994, ducts, pipes and gloveboxes are believed to be loaded with 440 to 660 pounds of lost plutonium. Another 440 to 660 pounds is believed lost in drums and other storage containers.
For protection, every person who today walks through the double doors of the Building 771 anti-contamination airlock must wear two layers of coveralls, three pairs of safety boots and booties, two sets of gloves - and a dosimeter badge that measures a visitor's radioactive exposure.
On the floor is a yellow line. One side is clean, the other contaminated. All protective clothes worn over the yellow line, into the hot zone, become nuclear waste that must be sent to a special government laundry in eastern Washington for decontamination or disposal.
'At some point, when you're inside there, you're going to be tempted to scratch your face or adjust your safety glasses. Don't do it,' radiation control worker Joe Springer tells a visitor. 'Don't touch anything.'
The warning doesn't have to be given twice. The gravity of the cleanup hits home every time visitors see teams of Rocky Flats workers, in yellow coveralls or white Tyvek moon suits, walking through the concrete hallways to their next demolition job.
Rooms here are lit dimly, and floors are painted battleship gray. Speakers constantly play KOSI-FM light-rock music. Though many bomb factory workers can't stand the station's typical fare of Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and the Backstreet Boys, they listen anyway because the noise means the public address system, which also blares alarms in case of radioactive accidents, is working.
Nine feet up a wall is a pizza-sized patch of purple paint, which seals a radioactive spray from some long-ago accident. Nearby, an entire glovebox became so hot from repeated leaks that the whole thing was painted brown.
Dozens of leaky valves and gaskets are wrapped in tape and shrink-wrapped clear plastic.
Up a 10-foot scaffold, workers in coveralls and respirators gingerly move along one of the most dangerous jobs at the plant - taking apart and draining more than 30 miles of plutonium pipes.
Like most nuclear bomb factories where security was a top concern, Rocky Flats has no accurate blueprints for many plutonium buildings.
In Building 771, where pipes carrying plutonium nitrate and other liquids are stacked overhead in up to 10 layers of confusing mazes, workers struggle to figure out where individual lines start and end.
There's no room for error. Draining too much plutonium nitrate at once can result in an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
'If we get 4 liters of this liquid, we're in the power business,' said Kelly Trice, manager of the Building 771 cleanup. 'Even a half an aspirin of plutonium is a major contamination problem. It would peg out the meters.'
While some crews drain pipes, others use jackhammers to peel away the inside of Building 771 like an onion, removing a half-inch of concrete wall and floor at a time until all radioactivity is gone.
It's slow, grueling work. To remove a single 6-foot concrete floor berm, which prevented spilled plutonium nitrate from flowing between rooms, Marcus Gonzales and six other workers needed a full day of pounding and scraping.
They call themselves the 'Berminators.'
Other workers put on moon suits to cut apart 217 contaminated gloveboxes. Though the typical Building 771 glovebox contains about a pound of lost plutonium dust, or holdup, some individual boxes are tainted with more than 5 pounds, or nearly enough to make a pit.
To take down a steel-and-glass glovebox, workers in moon suits build a clear plastic tent, called a bird cage, around it. Then they cut it apart with low-tech equipment such as band saws and Sawzalls.
Mistakes can be costly.
On Feb. 2, 1999, a worker was cutting apart a plutonium furnace with a band saw inside a glovebox. After finishing one cut through steel, the man, who is not being named to protect his privacy, started moving the saw for his next cut when his finger accidentally hit the 'on' switch.
The blade slashed his left index finger to the bone.
Safety workers rushed to help.
To prevent the wound from contaminating other workers, the man's hand was stuffed inside a plastic bag and sealed with tape.
An ambulance raced him to the Rocky Flats medical facility, where the wound was washed and tested and washed again. A physician gave him a shot of diethylenetriaminepentaacetate, or DTPA, an experimental drug that flushes heavy metals from the body.
For three days, the government collected all the man's urine and feces to see how much plutonium remained inside his body. Other tests continued for a year.
Rocky Flats officials said the man ended up receiving an initial radioactive dose 35 times higher than the annual limit for visitors to Rocky Flats, and 10 times more than the typical Denver resident receives in a year from natural radiation that comes from living at a high altitude.
The single finger cut loaded the worker with a long-term radioactive dose to his internal organs that exceeded the government's occupational safety limits by 30 percent. 'He has not suffered any health effects, nor do we expect him to,' said Mark Spears, the plant's chief radiation safety official.
The government fined Kaiser-Hill, the worker's employer and the main cleanup contractor at Rocky Flats, $41,250 for the accident.
'Kaiser-Hill managers failed to recognize that there had been a change in the work scope of the planned decontamination and decommissioning activities, and, as a result, did not re-evaluate the hazards and apply appropriate controls,' the Energy Department said.
After the accident, the company shut down the cleanup job and checked its safety procedures again.
The demolition project was completed 10 months later.
When Building 779, the plant's former laboratory, was reduced to a slab of concrete in January, it was the first time anyone had successfully demolished a plutonium bomb building.
Rocky Flats officials said the job was completed nine months ahead of schedule. But the demolition work cost $1,088 per square foot, or $74 million.
That was more than double the original cost estimate.
And that was for the plant's least-polluted plutonium building.
The overall Rocky Flats cleanup is running two years behind schedule, Energy Department officials said, though both government officials and Kaiser-Hill executives said they believe the company still can catch up to meet the 2006 cleanup completion date.
Kaiser-Hill has a huge financial incentive to meet that deadline. If the company completes the job by Dec. 15, 2006, and meets the overall budget, the government will pay it a $355 million bonus.
But if the cleanup stretches beyond April 1, 2007, the company is docked $54,794 a day.
The company gets to keep 30 cents of every dollar it saves, but must pay 30 cents of every dollar of total cost overruns.
'The money is significant, but the real incentive is the reputation Kaiser-Hill can make for itself,' said Paul Golan, the Energy Department's No. 2 manager at Rocky Flats. 'This is the first nuclear site to be brought to the ground. There are a lot of other nuclear sites around the world. If Kaiser-Hill can do it here and do it well, they become the Microsoft of the business.'
In a major change at Rocky Flats, rank-and-file workers earn incentive bonuses of up to 50 cents an hour if they meet performance standards on cleanup project safety and schedule.
'People are working themselves out of a job, but there's a tremendous amount of pride. You go into the buildings today and you see people kicking a--,' said Kaiser-Hill manager Bob Card.
Rocky Flats needs all the hustle it can get. When the uranium excavation crew of Mote, Fanning and Herring, among others, prepared to clean up Trench T-1, they expected to find 150 drums buried several feet below the prairie.
They ended up finding 171 drums as shallow as 8 inches underground.
One drum smoked and two others flared in blue fire when the excavation exposed them to air for the first time in four decades.
The whole job was completed 30 days ahead of schedule, in August 1998, at an on-budget cost of $12 million, or $70,175 per drum.
Now the workers are anxious for more.
'The stuff we're digging up was never supposed to be seen again. But we had the training, we did the preparation, we got it done,' Mote said. 'You never have a chance to become complacent. You don't have to exaggerate about this job.'
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: Courtesy of Rocky Flats and The Denver Post/Brian Brainerd and The Denver Post file photos The Building 771 complex, the world's first factory-size plutonium processing plant, is the most notorious at Rocky Flats. A plutonium button The 'Berminators' pause, above, while removing contaminated raised doorsills from Building 771. The decommissioning of the facility is a blue-collar job. Top, security remains tight at the former nuclear weapons plant. Kelly Trice, project manager at Building 771, looks at the remains of Building 779, which has been decontaminated and demolished except for the foundation slabs. Rocky Flats is the first nuclear weapons plant to be detoxified. Officials hope to be done with the cleanup by Dec. 15, 2006. The 6,000-acre plant will be transformed into hiking and biking trails, with some light industry. Cleanup crew members, left, work on some of the 171 rotting drums of uranium recovered from a trench. Don Sabac, above, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961, has seen both sides of the plant: Cold War producer of plutonium triggers and pioneer of nuclear cleanup. Development was far from Rocky Flats when the plant was built. Above, Colorado 72, between Arvada and Colorado 93, in April 1953. The gleaming barrels in this 1973 photo make up an orderly storage room. Today, rotting, contaminated drums are a major hazard. Above, workers in 1967 check in at Rocky Flats. Employees were required to have a separate security badge for each area of the sites they entered. Left, The Denver Post announces the selection of Colorado for the nation's newest top-secret nuclear weapons plant in 1951. Calvin Richard, left, and Dave DiMiana work on cleaning up contaminated soil at Rocky Flats in this June 1976 photo. The May 11, 1969, fire at Rocky Flats was devastating, destroying equipment and spreading contamination far and wide. Cleanup of the fire has never been completed. Rocky Flats workers used gloveboxes to work with the deadly plutonium, as shown in this 1971 photo. Some of the gloveboxes were as big as three Winnebagos. Hundreds of pipes, top, filled with radioactive acids are a time-consuming job for workers taking apart the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. Some pipes haven't been handled in 40 years. Left, the plant's 155-foot water tower, built in 1952, is the site's tallest structure. Dr. John Mann, standing, takes a look at Ronald Liskey in the early 1970s. Contamination has been a constant risk for workers at Rock Flats, though far more precautions are being taken now, during the cleanup phase. PHOTO: The Denver Post /John Epperson Rocky Flats, with the Denver skyline in the background, is expected to cost $7.7 billion to clean up. An estimated 16,000 pounds of high-grade plutonium has to be moved from the site. The Denver Post/Peter Pauley The isolated installation (map) The Denver Post/Thomas McKay What they did at Rocky Flats The Denver Post Radiation doses at Rocky Flats U.S. government expenditures, 1940-1996 *****