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300,000 students barred from making field trips to Rocky Flats

April 29, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Nearly 300,000 Colorado public school students now barred from making field trips to Rocky Flats
Denver Public Schools latest, and biggest, district to ban school visits to soon-to-open wildlife refuge

Andy Cross, The Denver Post
A bull elk runs to catch up to his herd at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Sept. 25, 2015.
By John Aguilar | jaguilar@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
April 29, 2018 at 6:00 am

Almost 300,000 students from metro Denver school systems will be barred from school-sanctioned trips to Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge after it opens this summer, with the state’s largest district enacting a ban last week on visits to the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site.
Denver Public Schools joined half a dozen other local school districts that say Rocky Flats, with its legacy of plutonium contamination that was often shrouded in secrecy, is too much of a risk for visiting schoolchildren.
“We live in the state of Colorado, where there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy the outdoors,” said Lisa Flores, a member of DPS’s school board, which Thursday brought forward a resolution forbidding its nearly 100,000 students from taking field trips to the 6,200-acre site, which sits 16 miles northwest of Denver. “This is a site we can take off that list.”
Boulder Valley School District and St. Vrain Valley School District passed similar resolutions last year, while superintendents at Adams 12 Five Star, Adams 14, Westminster Public Schools and Jefferson County Public Schools have issued directives forbidding field trips to Rocky Flats. The refuge is scheduled to open to the public this summer, although no firm date has been announced.
Christopher Allred, a member of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center and who has led the effort to get school districts to sign on to the ban, said the unanimous vote by the DPS board is a “very clear statement on the public’s concern about this issue.”
In the middle of the refuge is the 1,300-acre Central Operable Unit, where the sprawling weapons plant that formally closed in 1992 was actually located. It remains an off-limits Superfund site, a bleak reminder of the toxic history surrounding the former federal facility, where for nearly 40 years triggers for nuclear bombs were assembled.
“This is really about the urgent public health issue around the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opening up Rocky Flats (for public use),” Allred said. “The fact that the refuge is surrounding an active Superfund site means we need to be cautious.”
But Carl Spreng, the Rocky Flats program manager with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said there is nothing clear — or accurate — about the information school districts are getting from what he characterizes as a “traveling activist group” dead set against seeing the refuge open.
“At the core of this is anti-nuclear sentiment,” Spreng said. “They’re using scare tactics.”
He doesn’t deny the environmental problems that have been caused by Rocky Flats, which saw two plutonium-releasing fires in the 1950s and 1960s and an infamous storage pad where barrels leaked a noxious stew of plutonium-laced oil and solvents into the ground. But he said a decade-long cleanup, completed in 2005, was a success.
The rolling property between Arvada and Superior, he said, has been exhaustively tested for contamination over the years — with hundreds of thousands of surface and subsurface soil samples taken — with no areas inside the refuge’s boundaries found to have plutonium readings above what the state considers a health risk.
Radiation levels at Rocky Flats, Spreng said, are in line with background levels found in other parts of the state. According to the CDPHE, the average Coloradan is exposed to up to 650 millirems of radiation a year — a dosage that falls somewhere between a mammogram and a CT scan. A year’s worth of Rocky Flats radiation would add less than an additional millirem to that exposure level, Spreng said.
He said the losers in the effort to ban field trips to Rocky Flats are the kids, who won’t get to enjoy the sight of deer, elk, coyotes, prairie falcons and songbirds traversing the tallgrass prairie in their natural habitat.
“School districts have denied their students the opportunity to see an urban wildlife refuge,” Spreng said. “I’m frustrated by that.”
Worse still, he said, is that several of the school districts never contacted his office or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get the other side of the story before prohibiting school visits.
“The districts are making their decisions in the absence of full information,” Spreng said.
DPS’s Flores acknowledged that the district should have spoken with state health and federal officials before accepting the Rocky Flats opponents’ argument on its face. Not that the outcome of last week’s vote would have been any different, she said.
“In retrospect, yes, it would have been good to hear from these entities,” she said. “But the fact that it was a nuclear Superfund site had the larger bearing on the issue.”

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Disarmament Quotes

We endorse setting the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and working energetically on the actions required to achieve that goal ... 

George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger and Sam Nunn, January 4, 2007

Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into the world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man's discovery of fire. This basic force of the universe cannot be fitted into the outmoded concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world. We scientists recognise our inescapable responsibility to carry to our fellow citizens an understanding of atomic energy and its implication for society. In this lies our only security and our only hope - we believe that an informed citizenry will act for life and not for death. 

Albert Einstein, January 22, 1947

Now, understand, this matters to people everywhere. One nuclear weapon exploded in one city -– be it New York or Moscow, Islamabad or Mumbai, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, Paris or Prague –- could kill hundreds of thousands of people. And no matter where it happens, there is no end to what the consequences might be -– for our global safety, our security, our society, our economy, to our ultimate survival. 

Former President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlister Kings Bay Protestor 2019

We seek the elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth. 

Ronald Reagan, Inaugural Address, January 21, 1985

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth Bainbridge Deputy Director

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight Eisenhower US President 1953-1961

It is my firm belief that the infinite and uncontrollable fury of nuclear weapons should never be held in the hands of any mere mortal ever again, for any reason. 

Mikhail Gorbachev, 1995

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee Butler Former Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford "The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

[T]he use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. . . . [I]n being the first to use it, we . . . adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

5-Star Admiral William D. Leahy Chief of Staff to President's Roosevelt and Truman, leader of Combined US-UK Chiefs of Staff during WWII

Elimination of nuclear weapons, so naive, so simplistic, and so idealistic as to be quixotic? Some may think so. But as human beings, citizens of nations with power to influence events in the world, can we be at peace with ourselves if we strive for less? I think not. 

Robert McNamara Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

It is my fervent goal and hope…that we will some day no longer have to rely on nuclear weapons to deter aggression and assure world peace. To that end the United States is now engaged in a serious and sustained effort to negotiate major reductions in levels of offensive nuclear weapons with the ultimate goal of eliminating these weapons from the face of the earth. 

Ronald Reagan, October 20, 1986

There are still thousands of warheads loaded on operational systems and standing on high states of alert on virtually hair-trigger posture. And you have to ask yourself: Why is that? Who is the enemy? What is the threat? 

U.S. General Lee Butler Former Commander in Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command in 1991-92

So far as I can see, the atomic bomb has deadened the finest feeling that has sustained for ages. There used to be so-called laws of war, which made it tolerable. Now we know the truth. War knows no law except that of might. The atomic bomb brought an empty victory but it resulted for the time being in destroying the soul of Japan. What has happened to the soul of the destroying nation is yet too early to see... 

Mahatma Gandhi from The Essential Gandhi, Louis Fisher, ed.

Over the past 15 years, the goal of elimination of nuclear weapons has been so much on the back burner that it will take a true political breakthrough and a major intellectual effort to achieve success in this endeavor.

Mikhail Gorbachev, January 31, 2007

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