(January 19, 1996) Four gallons of plutonium-laced acid leaked for eight days at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in July 1995. The Rocky Flats management announced in December that at the time of the leak, workers at the plant did not at first believe the reading on a key gauge and that they later could not immediately find the leak because they had wrong blueprints of the building.
(445.4406) WISE-Amsterdam - Condensation from steam that heated buildings at the plant flowed through open valves into a tank holding nitric acid laced with plutonium. The water and acid mixture backed up into the steam system, ate through a pipe and spilled onto a basement floor. A key gauge showed the rising level of the liquid but plant workers initially refused to believe the alarming gauge reading. They soon realized their mistake but they could not find the leak in the 75 miles of pipes in the plant because the blueprints were wrong.
"To me, the major concern was that they couldn't find the source for a week", said Ed Kray, the state health department observer at Rocky Flats. "They didn't know what was coming into the tank and they didn't know what was in the spill until they did an analysis of it." Production of atomic weapons stopped at the Rocky Flats after the end of the Cold War, but pipes and tanks remained still filled with hazardous materials. All pipelines in the building should be cleared by September 1996. The Department of Energy admits that the wrong blueprints are a problem for cleaning the old plants. The blueprint problem, it adds, exists with all Cold War-era facilities.
Source: UPI, 14 Dec. 1995
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