Denver Escape Room

The Rocky Flats Plant was a former U.S. nuclear weapons production facility located about 15 miles northwest of Denver.Historical releases caused radioactive contamination within and outside its boundaries. The contamination primarily resulted from releases from the 903 Pad drum storage area – wind-blown plutonium that leaked from barrels of radioactive waste – and two major plutonium fires in 1957 and 1969 . Much lower concentrations of radioactive isotopes were released throughout the operational life of the plant from 1952 to 1992, from smaller accidents and from normal operational releases of plutonium particles too small to be filtered. Prevailing winds from the plant carried airborne contamination south and east, into populated areas northwest of Denver. The contamination of the Denver area by plutonium from the fires and other sources was not publicly reported until the 1970s. According to a 1972 study coauthored by Edward Martell, In the more densely populated areas of Denver, the Pu contamination level in surface soils is several times fallout, and the plutonium contamination just east of the Rocky Flats plant ranges up to hundreds of times that from nuclear tests. As noted by Carl Johnson in Ambio, Exposures of a large population in the Denver area to plutonium and other radionuclides in the exhaust plumes from the plant date back to 1953.Weapons production at the plant was halted after a combined FBI and EPA raid in 1989 and years of protests. The plant has since been shut down, with its buildings demolished and completely removed from the site. The Rocky Flats Plant was declared a Superfund site in 1989 and began its transformation to a cleanup site in February 1992. Removal of the plant and surface contamination was completed in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nearly all underground contamination was left in place, and measurable radioactive environmental contamination in and around Rocky Flats will probably persist for thousands of years. The land formerly occupied by the plant is now the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Plans to make this refuge accessible for recreation have been repeatedly delayed due to lack of funding and protested by citizen organizations.While some residual contamination remains above background levels, environmental data shows these levels are below health-based regulations that would trigger further action. Offsite areas and the lands now comprising the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge were studied as part of the cleanup. The Refuge lands did not require remediation because levels were so low, below action levels. Calculated external radiation doses to an adult or child Refuge visitor in the part of the Refuge with the highest detected levels of plutonium are 0.07 millirems per year and 0.2 mrem per year, respectively, based on an assumption of no ingestion., These levels are well below the Colorado Standards for Protection Against Radiation acceptable dose of 25 mrem per year. For comparison, a single medical x-ray can provide a dose of 10 mrem. The average annual radiation dose to an American is about 620 mrem per year from both naturally-occurring and commercial, industrial, and medical sources of radioactivity.The Department of Energy continues to monitor the site. Surface water sampling is ongoing and groundwater samples are regularly collected and analyzed. Some private groups and researchers remain concerned about the extent and long-term public health consequences of the contamination. Estimates of the public health risk caused by the contamination vary significantly, with accusations that the United States government is being too secretive and that citizen activists are being alarmist. The Comprehensive Risk Assessment for the site found the post-cleanup risks posed by the site to be very low and within EPA guidelines. A 1998 independent study by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on cancer rates in communities surrounding Rocky Flats also found no pattern of increased cancers tied to Rocky Flats. In 2016, this study was updated with 25 years of additional cancer data; the data supported the same conclusion. In September 2017, CDPHE's Cancer Registry released a supplement to this study in response to public interest. The supplement looked at the incidence of thyroid and all rare cancers in communities around Rocky Flats. Data showed no evidence of higher than expected rates of thryoid cancer. In addition, the overall incidence of all rare cancers was not higher than expected. However, the supplement identified a statistically higher rate of pancreatic cancer in men in Wheat Ridge; the supplement noted that pancreatic cancer has many risk factors associated with it: being overweight or obese, diabetes, a family history of the disease, smoking, and heavy alcohol use. Over 2/3 of these pancreatic cancer cases had a history of smoking and/or alcohol use.
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