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Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
Crown
June 2012
On Sale: June 5, 2012
416 pages
ISBN: 030795563X
EAN: 9780307955630
Kindle: B006L7I4AE
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction
about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small
Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons
plant once designated "the most contaminated site in
America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in
the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once
startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived
there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of
secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden
liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the
neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats
(cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)--best not to inquire
too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She
learned about the infamous 1969 Mother's Day fire, in which
a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited and--despite
the desperate efforts of firefighters--came perilously close
to a "criticality," the deadly blue flash that signals a
nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost
melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that
would have had devastating consequences for the entire
Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on
page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of
the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even
worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which
accidents were always called "incidents." And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant
work of investigative journalism--a detailed and shocking
account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the
effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky
Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice
in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky
Flats workers--from the healthy, who regard their work at
the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying,
who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and
class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book
promises to have a very long half-life.
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