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They tried to encircle Rocky Flats again Sunday, and they failed. It happens every year.
Even in Colorado, you just can't find enough people willing to give up a pleasant summer afternoon, perfect for a stroll in the mountains, just to stand around a sun-baked and windswept nuclear weapons plant, holding hands and chanting mantras.
Maybe that's because nobody has explained what would happen if Rocky Flats should be encircled. Will it levitate toward Mars? Will it thereafter produce not plutonium, but plowshares and pruning hooks? Will it just vanish in a puff of smoke so nontoxic that the fumes will be acceptable even in Boulder?
Actually, the best thing about Rocky Flats is that it already is encircled, every day. At least a million people live within 30 miles of the plant, and that means the plant will be run with at least some regard for public health and safety.
The prevailing wisdom is that Rocky Flats is in a terrible location, too close to a major city, and that at some point, the plant should be moved to a remote rural area where any accidental releases would infect or kill fewer people.
Assuming it's vital for our national well-being to make plutonium triggers for thermonuclear bombs, moving Rocky Flats sounds like a good idea.
But it isn't. For one thing, any place that Rocky Flats moved would not remain all that remote and rural. The plant has 6,000 employees. Those are primary jobs, so each accounts for 2.8 secondary jobs at gas stations, grocery stores, schools and the like. There are at least two people (children, spouses, etc.) for every job, so a community of 34,000 people sprouts up wherever Rocky Flats lands. Even in the middle of absolute nowhere -- Guffey, Woodrow or Maybell, for instance -- the resulting settlement would be the 13th largest city in the state, bigger than Grand Junction or Englewood.
Rocky Flats City would be a modern version of the company town of yore. Everyone's paycheck would depend on the plant. The local newspaper would not publish critical stories, and any vocal citizens would feel considerable community pressure, ranging from employment threats to midnight beatings, to shut up and move away. People take jobs quite seriously, much more seriously than potential health threats.
If Rocky Flats City were far from metropolitan Colorado, nobody who matters would pay much attention to it. Look around rural Colorado. You'll find cyanide leaching in the watershed that provides the drinking water for San Luis. Some people in Kremmling and Olathe complain about the formaldehyde fumes from the Louisiana-Pacific waferboard mills. The Arkansas River carries selenium and arsenic.
In Denver, where Colorado's decisions are made, nobody appears to care much about these potential threats to the public health. But every time you pick up the paper or watch the news, you'll see Rocky Flats: full-scale investigations by the EPA and FBI, monitors who examine air and water for escaping radiation, former employees going public with safety concerns, the search for a waste-storage site, arrests of people who threaten to shut it down, our governor expressing his great interest.
The metropolitan economy is not dominated by Rocky Flats, so there are thousands of people who feel free to speak. Because Rocky Flats sits on the edge of the metropolis, it is watched -- and watched very closely -- as it should be.
Move Rocky Flats, and you'd have toxic stuff leaking all the time without anybody noticing in a company town where no one dared protest. Since radiation spreads, the overall threat to the public health might well be greater with a remote Rocky Flats. If we must have a bomb plant, this one's in the safest possible place.
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