i am reading about the rocky flats nuclear weapons plant and these "key milestones" give you a taste of what is to come

the tl;dr is they made plutonium "pits" for nuclear bombs, either from new plutonium sources or reprocess parts of old bombs, from 1957 until 1988

in 1988, the EPA investigated the site, shrieked in horror, and shut the place down. the DOE stuck their fingers in their ears and went LA LA LA DON'T WANNA DEAL WITH IT for about five years afterward, but finally started cleanup in '94.

Among the tasks: cleaning 13 "infinity rooms" - areas so radioactive that plant instruments went off the scale, and were just sealed in place. One had been welded shut and abandoned as far back as '72. One had been piled full of contaminated equipment and filled with concrete.

US Gov: your task is finding the 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.

Contractors:

"...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 that they exceeded the gov't annual dose limits - and were forced out of plutonium areas and into desk-jobs - were 'crapped out.'"

"Building 771 was feared, and the reason was leaks. There were incidents there every day, every week, every year.

"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."

"alright, so either i can have a criticality accident in the glovebox in front of me, or i can dump the radioactive solution on the floor and clean it up with some kimwipes with my bare hands"

what do you do if you scrape yourself on contaminated material while trying to clean up after a plutonium fire: i dunno, amputate?

and you thought not touching your face because of COVID was important

hahaha imagine trying to safely disassemble this facility with no as-builts, i'm literally shaking with second-hand anxiety

this is all from a Denver Post article from 2000. I'm about to dig through a DOE site assessment in '94, when they finally decided they had to do something about the facility

https://extras.denverpost.com/news/news0625a.htm

yeah this seems like a safe method of storing waste at a nuclear production facility

oops

eh, material choice probably wasn't important for piping that was intended for plutonium nitrate, nitric acid, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, hydrogen fluoride, and other fun chemicals. Engineers! whada they know, anyway?

christ, can you imagine the balls of a machinist who has to turn plutonium on a lathe in a glovebox

...how do you do maintenance on a fully contaminated lathe entombed in a glovebox?

also wowow now you've got radioactive coolant oil to deal with

the completely chill descriptions of the conditions in building 771 are t e r r i f y i n g. Just all sorts of shit that had been abandoned in place because it was too contaminated to work with and no one wanted to deal with it.

this document is exhausting, it's basically page after page of "... and this building is just increasingly full of radioactive trash that no one knows what to do with. Here's where we estimate all the plutonium contamination is. fuck."

"fun facts!"

got 'em

when it takes a decade to clean up your facility to the point that a criticality accident is merely "improbable", you done fucked up

(also this sounds like it was a frankly heroic cleanup effort)

and what did they do with room 141, the infamous "infinity room"? they used a fog machine to catch all the airborne contamination to the point that workers could enter for cleanup, then chopped the whole room right out of the building to ship to a waste isolation site.