• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • About
    • Allies
    • Board of Directors
    • Guiding Principles
    • Member Organizations
    • Mission & History
  • Membership
  • Request a Speaker
  • Volunteer
  • Contact Us
  • Contribute

The Colorado Coalition

Envision a World without Nuclear Weapons

Click Here to Contribute

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • RSS
  • Featured
  • Events
  • Take Action
  • News
  • Perspective
  • Subscribe

Dueling Sciences– Keep Rocky Flats closed!!!

November 16, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

By JUDITH MOHLING

Remember a long ago movie, “Deliverance,” 1972, starring Burt Reynolds? A prominent scene involved two musicians, playing back and forth sets of notes. The music is called, “Dueling Banjo’s.” The movie chronicles an ill-fated canoe trip taken by four Atlanta businessmen.

While we have worked for years to close down Rocky Flats and keep it closed forever, the Department of Energy and now the Division of Fish and Wildlife have maintained that the site is safe and poses no health risks for visitors from breathing in alpha particles of plutonium. They present what they see as definitive scientific evidence re: water, air and soil around and downwind of Rocky Flats that they trust as scientifically accurate and comprehensive. On the other hand, the Rocky Flats Technical Group, and many activists have their own scientific evidence that they see as scientifically accurate and comprehensive. Back and forth, the “facts” have been quoted. Like “Dueling Banjos.”

With the scientific facts that we trust, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has mounted a campaign to halt public recreation at the Rocky Flats National Refuge which is now open to the public. Chris Allred and Brittany Gutermuth, employees of the Center, have collected both individual and group signatures to accompany a letter they have authored, to Carmelo Melendez, Director of the Office of Legacy Management of the Department of Energy, and Cynthia Martinez, chief of the National Wildlife Refuge System. The following is excerpted from the text of their letter:

“In the best interest of public health, DOE Legacy Management and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must immediately halt public recreation at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge (‘the refuge’).   The refuge is on the buffer zone of the Rocky Flats Plant (1952-1989) which produced 70,000 weapons-grade plutonium pits for the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal. Activities at the plant led to contaminated soil, sediment, groundwater and surface water due to accidental leakages and serious fires in 1957 and 1969, emitting plutonium into the air. The land where the plant was located is now a federally designated Superfund site.

“Remediation from the Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement was limited to the Central Operable Unit and no action was required for the refuge land. According to Kaiser Hill’s 2006 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Facility Investigation, there is plutonium above background level on the refuge.

“Scientists and medical doctors around the world have researched the impacts of plutonium and have found significant risks attached to inhaling a microparticle of plutonium, invisible to the human eye.

“Seven school districts have made commitments to not allow field trips to the refuge, protecting nearly 300,000 students from contamination.

“We call on USFWS and DOE to acknowledge these events and the public opposition to opening the refuge. Considering the health and safety concerns, it is paramount that USFWS and DOE Legacy Management permanently close the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

About Bob Kinsey

Primary Sidebar

Disarmament Quotes

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

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“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 McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"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 EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

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

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 ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

Copyright © 2025 The Colorado Coalition


A Website by Arielle Elak Design