Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

This is not a book I enjoyed reading but Iversen's deceptively simple prose sure packs a wallop. In paralleling the interior secrets of her families silence in the face of her father's alcoholism and the ravages sustained by that with the government and community silence and denial of the damage that plutonium from the Rocky Flats facility, she makes our own complicity with those denials clear.

My professor for Professional Responsibility (that is ethics for those who are not familiar with law school euphemisms) was a rather brilliant libertarian crank who had been for some time Ayn Rand's lawyer. One day he got into it (not for the first or last time) with one of our more loudmouthed classmates who is now a loudmouthed real estate developer who has public screaming matches with advocates for the environment and racial and economic justice. When the classmate was backed into a corner in the argument he yelled "Law has nothing to do with justice!" Every day for the rest of the term the prof wrote those words on the board followed by an attribution to that student whom I won't name here. As I read this book I kept thinking of show more that. Law has nothing to do with justice. I may not agree on much with that loudmouth student or with that libertarian prof but on this point we all come together.

Full Body Burden is the story of the history and impact of Rocky Flats, likely the most hazardous nuclear waste site in the US and the one for which the smallest amount of remediation and redress has been forthcoming. The government denies Rocky Flats is an issue despite having radioactive material in the soil and groundwater at rates higher than Nagasaki just after we bombed it. In fact Rocky Flats has been turned into a recreational area and wildlife preserve. But that is not the only story here. Don't miss the rest of the subtitle; The book is also about Kristen Iverson growing up. The cone of silence around Iverson's fracturing family is but a subset of the cone of silence around most things that are thought to be embarrassing, or which could prove inconvenient, like industrial poisoning that hurt or killed thousands of people. I grew up in the same type of corrosive environment a few years later and a 1000 miles away, but it was all recognizable. I was floored by how seamlessly Iverson knitted together the story of the Rocky Flats plant and the many people who died or were physically damaged by the cavalier flinging about of plutonium and other radioactive materials, and the destruction of a family forced into silence as they were ravaged by their father's alcoholism and their mother's repression and denial. Iverson's approach to the material is brilliant and innovative and she is a hell of a good writer. I have had this book on my shelf for years and every time I looked at it I thought it would be dry, but it was so far from that. It was riveting and affecting and infuriating, but not dry.

The moronic innocence of the 70's (see no evil, hear no evil, etc.) would be sad and sweet if it could be left to nostalgia, but alas most people still live there, ignoring things that will destroy us individually and collectively because it is inconvenient to stop things that provide jobs and/or increase comfort. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said “We will go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective.” Kurt was a true sage.

This is a very very good book. If you have a chance to read it, you should do that. show less

This was a fascinating look at the Rocky Flats, Colorado plant that built the “triggers” for the atomic bomb, and produced a lot of plutonium waste that affected people’s health that lived around the plant. However according to the government everything is fine and no one should worry.

Kristen grew up next to the plant though neither of her parents worked at the plant, plenty of her friends’ parents did, plus she rode horse and played within close proximity to the plant never realizing it would affect her health years later. That is the scary part about this contamination your symptoms don’t show up immediately it takes decades in some people for the cancers to show up.

At first I was a little put off by her family story since show more neither of her parents worked at the plant so I didn’t really understand why there was so much about her fathers alcoholism but then she said ‘I couldn’t tell one story without the other because as big as Rocky Flats was in my growing up so was fathers alcoholism they went hand in hand in my memories.” (This is paraphrased) but it made me understand why the two stories needed to be told.

What I found most upsetting in reading this book was; the government cover-ups that went on for decades under the shroud of national security, the tons and tons of missing plutonium, the barrels of waste rusting and leaking into the ground, and that this place even after “clean-up” has no warning signs for people using the reclaimed land as a park. It also amazes me how stupid we were about the effects of plutonium that they built this plant 15 miles from the huge metropolis of Denver. And the lies that the DoE was checking on the levels out there and come to find out that the company that owns the plant send them a memo/report saying everything is fine and we have checked and it was all lies but was rubber stamped by the people that were supposed to be protecting the peoples’ health.

The sad part is Rocky Flats is in no way alone there are numerous plants around the country with these same problems and when you look into nuclear power plants you open up another scary can of worms about the waste from those too.

I think this and books like it are very important to read and research for yourself. I highly recommend this book.

4 stars show less

A scary, rattling, sleep-disturbing read. Kristen Iversen intersperses a memoir of her childhood in Arvada, CO with an investigation/expose of the nearby Rocky Flats Plant, a nuclear weapons production facility operated by the Department of Energy beginning in the 1950s. The themes of secrecy and denial pervade the narrative -- both the personal (Iversen's father's alcoholism that destroyed the family, and the general code of the time not to discuss anything unpleasant) and the very public (massive contamination of the air, soil and water of the region by plutonium and other extremely toxic elements; gruesome cancers running through nearly every family in the area, all denied or denounced by the government: "It's all perfectly safe *big show more smily face*!!"). An extremely important read -- I would say for anyone who lives near Denver as I do, but for everyone, really, as there are super toxic nuclear weapons facilities all over the country and the world. Rocky Flats was raided by the FBI in 1989 -- one federal agency raiding another -- and their months-long investigation resulted in the plant ceasing operations, and a massive lawsuit (won, then overturned). Today, Rocky Flats is a park and wildlife refuge area open (most of it) for anyone to visit. Efforts to erect signage indicating that the site is massively contaminated have failed.

"We don't talk about plutonium. It's bad for business. It reminds us of what we don't want to acknowledge about ourselves. We built nuclear bombs, and poisoned ourselves in the process. Where does the fault lie? Atomic secrecy, the Cold War culture, bureaucratic indifference, corporate greed, a complacent citizenry, a failed democracy? What is a culture but a group of individuals acting on the basis of shared values?" show less

Full Body Burden is yet another in a long line of devastating books about the impacts of nuclear radiation. Rocky Flats, just a few miles northwest Denver, was the primary factory for making plutonium cores used in America's nuclear weapons arsenal. Over the years there were unethical safety measures, spilling many tons of plutonium into the local soil and water, where it has inevitably found its way into the lungs and brains of Colorado people, with devastating consequences. You couldn't pay me to live in Colorado, at least anywhere near this location. The world is loaded with spots like this, not only from radiation but chemical and biological. It makes for compelling who-done-it mysteries but is horrifying. This account is show more particularly good since it is by a victim who could relate the history of place from first-hand experience. show less

I was afraid that this book would be another anti-nuke book from a crazy lefty from Boulder, so I was completely amazed at what a great book it is! The author weaves her own memoir of growing up into the story and how secrets have a way of destroying everything around them. The author points out the lies and coverups by various government agencies as well as by the corporations hired to manage Rocky Flats. I don't take everything cited in the book as gospel but there is enough evidence to make even a cynic realize that the government does not put protecting its citizens at the top of the priority list.

Having lived for more than 40 years in Colorado, but thankfully, not in the shadows of Rocky Flats, I was both interested in and woefully uninformed about what went on at this facility for producing plutonium "triggers." Now that I've read the book, I know that the "woefully unaware" part is not entirely my fault - great effort was made to keep me and everyone else unaware and misinformed.

Full Body Burden is both an expose of Rocky Flats and a memoir of someone growing up almost literally in its shadow. The author grew up in a time when kids were sent outside to play in the morning and not expected to come home until dinner. As a memoir, the book was warm and thoughtful, but I was appalled at the revolving door attitude towards pets show more that came and went. As in so many memoirs now, alcoholism was involved, but this was not a "poor little me" type of story.

As an expose of Rocky Flats, I was appalled by all that went on there, by the intentional secrecy and lies, by the disregard for safety and care. All these years later, records are still sealed, whistle blowers have had their lives ruined. And of course, people closest to the plant have paid the greatest price.

And when RF was dismantled, I thought that clean up meant clean up. Silly me. I have always been bothered with nuclear facilities because of the problem of disposal of the waste, lethal substances with half-lives sometimes in the millions of years, with the devil-may-care attitude that someone will figure out something later. I learned that there are so many more problems than just that.

The negatives to the book are that the story was not always told in a linear manner, and the skipping around was sometimes hard to follow, and that there was too much repetition, particularly of scientific facts important to the story. Still, I found it quite interesting and eye-opening.

I was given a copy of the book for review, for which I am grateful. show less