MAGAZINES 
Boulder Magazine, Summer 2011
Feature Article
Boulder's Nuclear Neighbor
Less than 30 miles from Boulder, the Fort St. Vrain plant near Platteville generated nuclear power, off and on, from 1976 to 1989. And in 1978, it leaked.
by Mark Collins
Steam rises from Weld County’s Fort St. Vrain Nuclear Generation Station on Dec. 11, 1976, the first day it generated power to the electric grid. The nuclear fuel was in the building on the left; the building on the right housed Public Service Company (now Xcel Energy) offices and switches. It currently functions as a gas-fired Xcel power plant. Photo courtesy R.S. ‘Joe’ Pinner, FSV historian
Irene Sterkel can still remember how people who visited from elsewhere marveled that she and her husband, Robert, operated a dairy farm so close to a nuclear reactor. The Sterkels moved near Platteville, Colo., in 1963. Thirteen years later, the Fort St. Vrain nuclear facility—a one-of-a-kind power plant, and the only nuclear power plant in Colorado’s history—started producing energy. As the crow flies, the Sterkels’ farm was 3 miles from the nuclear reactor.
“They didn’t think we could raise crops close to it or raise cattle or sheep around it,” Sterkel says. “But we did. I don’t think any of us was really worried about it.”
Steve Shafer didn’t worry about it each day he went to work at the plant. Now Platteville’s mayor, Shafer worked as an operator at Fort St. Vrain from 1970, during its construction phase, until 1996, after the troubled nuclear facility had been decommissioned and transformed into a natural-gas power plant.
“People that knew nothing about it, that didn’t live around it, were screaming and ranting and raving,” says Shafer. “And people that lived around here didn’t care.”
Shafer says he doesn’t even remember an event in 1978 that led to the plant’s temporary closure due to a leak of radioactive materials. On Jan. 23 of that year, operations were halted at Fort St. Vrain, which sits 28 miles northeast of Boulder. Officials evacuated the plant’s 250 or so workers and cordoned off a 2-mile radius after a leak of helium, the reactor’s unique gas coolant, was detected. Fifteen workers registered a low level of radioactive contamination, and they were sprayed with a cleaning agent, according to newspaper accounts at the time.
Initial reports of the incident that morning in January 1978 included word that a cloud of nuclear material had leaked from Fort St. Vrain and was drifting south toward Denver. That proved to be an overstatement. But newspapers reported in the following days that some Platteville residents were concerned that authorities weren’t clear and forthcoming about what was actually happening during the event.
Left: Local residents get a tour around the cooling towers on June 21, 1970, during the building of the plant. Right: A member of the Colorado Health Department uses a Geiger counter to check the clothing of radiochemist Rowena Argall on Jan. 23, 1978, after a radiation leak at the plant. More than 250 workers were evacuated that day, and 15 were found to have received “light” contamination. Plant photo courtesy Irene Sterkel; radiation check by AP Images
Betty Ball, a member of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, in Boulder, remembers the incident at Fort St. Vrain. “That was right at the same time that the Rocky Flats Truth Force was beginning,” Ball says, “when people started sitting on the train tracks at Rocky Flats”—the former nuclear facility on Route 93, south of Boulder, that produced triggers for nuclear weaponry. “So we had a lot of antinuclear protests going on. Rocky Flats was one leak after another. When Fort St. Vrain happened, everybody was really up in arms.”
Ball remembers joining a group of 50 to 100 protesters who showed up in Platteville in the weeks after the leak, and the site drew a much larger protest the following year. In June 1979, a few months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident—the most significant nuclear accident in U.S. history—roughly 1,400 protestors rallied at Fort St. Vrain.
Helium: Still controversial
The facility’s use of helium as a coolant was unusual. Most nuclear reactors, such as the Fukushimi Daiichi Reactor in northern Japan, which suffered a partial nuclear meltdown after the earthquake and tsunami there in March, use water. The helium coolant system was problematic.
“A day after a birthday party, all the balloons are on the floor. Helium leaks out very quickly,” says Jerry Peterson, a nuclear physicist and professor at CU-Boulder. “So having high-temperature, high-pressure seals on that helium seems to have been the problem.” But Peterson adds that helium leakage at Fort St. Vrain did not necessarily mean the leakage of radioactive materials.
Ted Borst began working at Fort St. Vrain in 1980, and he currently is facility manager at the independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFI) in Platteville where nuclear fuel left over from Fort St. Vrain is stored. He believes that helium was safer than water as a reactor coolant. “Even in the event of a leak like [the one in 1978], the exposure to anyone outside was unlikely because the helium would have dissipated rapidly in the environment,” Borst says. “It really doesn’t come down to the ground; it just goes up. One of the things they’re talking about in Japan is this radioactive water that’s coming out of the reactor and getting into the ground and into the ocean. Water tends to pick up radioactive material more than helium does. So our system was clean.”
Left: Only 10 percent of Fort St. Vrain’s nuclear fuel was used. The rest is now stored in a U.S. Department of Energy facility adjacent to the Xcel power plant, in more than 1,400 graphite blocks, each 31 inches tall, like the simulated one at center. Stacks of six are stored in steel containers sunk into the floor. Right: In 1970, Public Service prepared its 21 original licensed reactor operators with a special three-and-a-half-month training course in La Jolla, Calif. Fuel storage courtesy Doe; operators courtesy R.S. ‘Joe’ Pinner, FSV historian
The nuclear facility near Platteville stuttered along for more than a decade, suffering multiple shutdowns due to mechanical issues. It was shuttered for good in 1989, but not because of safety concerns. It was because the energy plant had become a financial sinkhole for Public Service Company—the utility company, now called Xcel Energy, that operated the plant. One newspaper report from the time claimed what was originally a $110 million project turned into a $1.2-billion enterprise.
“It was a unique design,” says Ted Borst. “When it was built, a lot of the things in the design worked well and some of them didn’t work very well. As a result, the plant only operated about 15 percent of the time, which was not enough to make money for the company, given the costs.”
The ISFI site Borst manages houses 1,464 graphite blocks containing nuclear fuel from the Fort St. Vrain reactor. The blocks, weighing roughly 300 pounds each, are stored in stacks and contained in steel. “It’s designed to withstand natural phenomena like earthquakes, tornadoes, flood and fire,” Borst says. “It’s been analyzed against terrorist attacks.”
Nuclear Future?
Borst says Fort St. Vrain’s spent fuel could be used at another nuclear facility, but it would have to be reconditioned into another form. Peterson says computer technology developed during the past 25 years has made nuclear energy a safer endeavor. He says advanced technology helps in training operators and in mechanizing operations.
Still, Ball would prefer never to see another nuclear facility in Colorado for a variety of reasons. “It’s fraught with problems from beginning to end,” she says. “Mining uranium is horrible and happens largely on indigenous people’s land. Then the waste products from [mining] contaminate the surrounding area.” Ball used to live and work in Nucla, Colo., a tiny outpost in the southwestern corner of the state, about 80 miles east of Moab, Utah. During parts of the past century, uranium mining provided a boost for the local economy in Nucla, but it also scarred the community.
Looking southwest toward Platteville, this 2001 photo shows the landscape around the Xcel power plant and DOE spent-fuel storage facility. Photo courtesy R.S. ‘Joe’ Pinner, FSV historian
“We were surrounded by uranium mines over there,” Ball says. “It was horrible. Still today, one of these sites, the Uravan Uranium Project, is a Superfund site.… There was this tailings pond that—and I’m not exaggerating—it really glowed in the dark.”
Peterson, though, says nuclear energy is likely in Colorado’s future. Asked why, he says, “Dissatisfaction with coal, the rising price of natural gas and the awareness of carbon dioxide issues are going to trump the other concerns.” Last year, an attorney named Don Banner initiated a move to build a nuclear reactor southwest of Pueblo, Colo. The proposed energy-producing facility would need government approval, and estimated costs to build it top $5 billion. The idea has already met with resistance from some in that community.
“Instead of subsidizing the nuclear energy at billions of dollars, why don’t we go for the renewables like wind and solar power?” Ball asks. “If we were subsidizing renewables that way, we would have a safe, secure future.”
As a student at Boulder High School in the 1970s, Mark Collins remembers watching a documentary about nuclear energy that featured the Fort St. Vrain nuclear facility.
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