The World Without Us

The Rocky Flats asphalt where drums of radioactive oil spilled was also scraped and shipped to South Carolina, along with three feet of soil. More than half its 800 structures were razed, including the infamous “Infinity Room,” where contamination levels rose higher than instruments could measure. Several buildings were mostly underground; after the removal of items like the glove boxes used to handle the shiny plutonium disks that triggered A-bombs, the basement floors were buried.

Atop them, a mix of native bluestem tall grass and side-oats grama grass has been planted to assure a habitat for resident elk, mink, mountain lion, and the threatened Prebel’s meadow jumping mouse, which have impressively thrived in the plant’s 6,000-acre security buffer despite the evil brewing at its center. Regardless of the grim business that went on here, these animals seem to be doing fine. However, while there are plans to monitor the human wildlife managers for radiation intake, a refuge official admits doing no genetic tests on the wildlife itself.

“We’re looking at human hazards, not damage to species. Acceptable dose levels are based on 30-year career exposures. Most animals don’t live that long.”

Maybe not. But their genes do.

Anything at Rocky Flats too hard or too hot to move was covered with concrete and 20 feet of fill, and will remain off-limits to hikers in the wildlife preserve, though how they’ll be deterred hasn’t been decided. At WIPP, where much of Rocky Flats ended up, the U.S. Department of Energy is legally required to dissuade anyone from coming too close for the next 10,000 years. After discussing the fact that human languages mutate so fast that they’re almost unrecognizable after 500 or 600 years, it was decided to post warnings in seven of them anyway, plus pictures. These will be incised on 25-foot-high, 20-ton granite monuments and repeated on nine-inch disks of fired clay and aluminum oxide, randomly buried throughout the site. More-detailed information about the hazards below will go on the walls of three identical rooms, two of them also buried. The whole thing will be surrounded by a 33-foot-tall earthen berm a half-mile square, embedded with magnets and radar reflectors to give every possible signal to the future that something lurks below.

Whether who-or-whatever finds it someday can actually read, or heed, danger in those messages may be moot: the construction of this complex scarecrow to posterity isn’t scheduled until decades from now, after WIPP is full. Also, after just five years, plutonium-239 was already noticed leaking from WIPP’s exhaust shaft. Among the unpredictables is how all the irradiated plastic, cellulose, and radionuclides below will react as brine percolates through the salt formations, and as radioactive decay adds heat. For that reason, no radioactive liquids are allowed lest they volatilize, but many interred bottles and cans contain contaminated residues that will evaporate as temperatures rise. Head space is being left for buildup of hydrogen and methane, but whether it’s enough, and whether WIPP’s exhaust vent will function or clog, is the future’s mystery.

4. Too Cheap to Meter

At the biggest U.S. nuclear plant, the 3.8-billion-watt Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station in the desert west of Phoenix, water heated by a controlled atomic reaction turns to steam, which spins the three largest turbines General Electric ever manufactured. Most reactors worldwide function similarly; like Enrico Fermi’s original atomic pile, all nuke plants use moveable, neutron-sopping cadmium rods to dampen or intensify the action.

In Palo Verde’s three separate reactors, these dampers are interspersed among nearly 170,000 pencil-thin, 14-foot zirconium-alloy hollow rods stuffed end to end with uranium pellets that each contain as much power as a ton of coal. The rods are bunched into hundreds of assemblies; water flowing among them keeps things cool, and, as it vaporizes, it propels the steam turbines.

Together, the nearly cubical reactor cores, which sit in 45-foot-deep pools of turquoise water, weigh more than 500 tons. Each year, about 30 tons of their fuel is exhausted. Still packed inside the zirconium rods, this nuclear waste is removed by cranes to a flat-roofed building outside the containment dome, where it is submerged in a temporary holding pond that resembles a giant swimming pool, also 45 feet deep.