LETTER FROM LEROY MOORE TO EPA
March 11, 2010
To: Ms. Lisa Jackson, Director
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
From: LeRoy Moore, Ph.D.
Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center
Re: Postscript to my March 5, 2010, letter calling on the EPA to revisit the cleanup of Rocky Flats
A key assumption of the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement of 2003, to which EPA was a party, is that plutonium left in the environment at Rocky Flats would remain “relatively immobile.” My March 5, 2010, letter showed (on pages 2 and 3) that those who made this assumption failed to consider the real-time detection of plutonium moving in subsurface soil at Rocky Flats in the wet spring of 1995 as well as a 1996 study showing that burrowing animals are constantly redistributing plutonium in soil at the site. In sum, plutonium left behind at Rocky Flats does move or is moved. In the few days since writing that letter I received a report of an eleven-year study recently completed at DOE’s Savannah River Site demonstrating that some plutonium in subsurface sediments at that site moved upward from the buried source material. The authors of this study conclude “that the upward movement was largely the result of invading grasses taking up the plutonium and translocating it upward,” producing an eventual “measurable accumulation of plutonium on the ground surface.”13 The Rocky Flats site consists for the most part of prairie grassland. If grass at the Savannah River Site brings plutonium up to the surface, should we not expect something very similar to happen at Rocky Flats? Very likely the grasses at Rocky Flats have roots that run deeper into the soil than those at Savannah River, due to the comparably drier climate of the prairie where Rocky Flats is situated. The very question whether the grass at Rocky Flats brings plutonium to the surface presents an uncertainty worth detailed exploration at the Rocky Flats site.
13 D. I. Kaplan et al., “Upward Movement of Plutonium to Surface Sediments During an 11-Year Field Study, SRNL-STI-2010-00029, January 25, 2010. http://sti.srs.gov/fulltext/SRNL-STI-2010-00029.pdf
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