For decades the focus of anti-nuclear activists has been on plutonium remaining in Rocky Flats soil. Health risks to those around the Refuge from this trace contaminant are tiny and almost definitely unmeasurable. We supply below the background science to understand this.
Each technical document below has plenty of carefully vetted references to national and international reports and to articles in refereed scientific journals. In each, if you click on a citation you'll be transported to the bibliography entry, where there are usually clickable links to the original document. Flyers are relatively non-technical and mostly graphics-based.
We suggest that you read or skim these in order since later documents refer occasionally to earlier documents.
As of November 2023, in the interest of getting most of the message out ASAP, some technical documents are not yet complete. They will appear soon. These include
- A detailed summary of all data about radioactivity (including hot particles) around Rocky Flats, and the ICRP framework for computing dose by inhalation and ingestion.
- A document about careful epidemiology--the Hill criteria, excess relative risk, confounders, and blunders and biases. Radiation epidemiology and recent developments, and the effects of variable population density. There is a careful discussion of RESRAD and its results, and recent epidemiology for nuclear plant workers and what this has to say about the population around Rocky Flats. We see that the dependence of childhood leukemia rates on variations in background radiation is probably detectable with studies of many thousands of children. Since the contribution of soil Pu yields doses many hundreds of times smaller than background, it is unlikely that cancers downwind of Rocky Flats will ever be detected, if present at all.
- A document reviewing all epidemiological findings about the area around Rocky Flats, from Carl Johnson through the Downwinder's 2016 survey. The situation was clear by the late 1980s.
- A detailed document about the Superfund cleanup.
Science background
How people think about radiation
Radiation, biology, and health physics
Radiation doses: large, small, unavoidable
From radiation dose to cancer risk
'Recent' developments in low-dose radiation [beyond LNT]
Careful epidemiology
Rocky Flats epidemiology
Ongoing developments in radiation epidemiology
Actual measurements
Ketterer's hot particles November 2020; non-technical 2-page flyer
Jefferson Parkway sampling results
The great Jefferson Parkway hot sample kerfuffle
Radiation levels on the trails and a non-technical flyer with the results
Inside the 'Central Operable Unit' [DOE 'donut hole'] and another non-technical flyer about being near the Ralston Buttes
What's in Rocky Flats soil? 2-page non-technical flyer including trail data.
Alarmist junk raised by anti-nuclear activists
Cancer clusters around Rocky Flats
"Hot particles" and their history
Burrowing critters transport plutonium! You shouldn't have controlled burns!
Alarmist junk raised by anti-nuclear activists
Cancer clusters around Rocky Flats
"Hot particles" and their history
Burrowing critters transport plutonium! You shouldn't have controlled burns!
Nuclear instrumentation
Geiger-Muller counters, gamma ray spectroscopy, radon measurements and radon daughters
Archives [from website version 1]
- David Wood’s presentation to Candelas residents (10 MB); slightly more verbiage, same slides.
- A parable: why do you drink municipal water?
- Seeking clarity in fall 2013: DMW's 2013 experience before buying a house in Candelas
- Ground truth at Rocky Flats
Lettters to Broomfield City Council, August 2019
Despite competent advice from Jennifer Opila (CDPHE) and Dr. Christopher Urbina, Broomfield got suckered by anti-nuclear activists. Here is are DMW's attempts to rebut nonsense from Randy Stafford.