ROCKY HORROR SHOW

(2 of 2)

Silverman arrived in 1993, aiming to make short work of his Herculean task: draining liquid plutonium from leaking containers, venting drums of hydrogen to prevent explosions, baking plutonium metal for storage in sealed vaults. But he and cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill ran into a brick, or rather a paper, wall. Of the 250 cleanup "milestones" set by the EPA and Colorado's Department of Health and Environment, only two dozen spelled out concrete action. The rest mostly involved producing one report after another, generating much paper but no progress. Scores of internal policy directives, set in place by the DOE itself, further impeded the effort. "The people who wrote these procedures had little idea of how things actually worked," says Silverman. "They were more worried about going to jail than about plutonium risks."

SILVERMAN'S RESPONSE TO MANY OF these hurdles has been to ignore them. After the draining mishap, he went ahead and emptied the three problem plutonium tanks without upgrading the entire building, and he retrained just 12 workers instead of all 150. He slashed the number of signatures needed to get visitors into high-security areas from nine to three. Ignoring bureaucratic protocol, he and Kaiser-Hill excavated toxic soils from an area known as Ryan's Pit without preparing exhaustive studies. Silverman bristles at the seemingly arbitrary personnel rules he's supposed to follow. "Why does it take 16 people to move a single barrel from one building to another?" he asks rhetorically.

If Silverman's behavior is bizarre for a bureaucrat, the reaction of his bosses is even more surprising: they're going along with it. Regulators have met with the Rocky Flats management team to rewrite and simplify the cumbersome rules, and the DOE has approved Silverman's plan to further cut the facility's 4,878-person work force. Admits Assistant Energy Secretary Thomas Grumbly: "We have created a paperwork jungle over the past 50 years."

Now the agency is considering a proposal by Silverman and Kaiser-Hill to seal up Rocky Flats once and for all. By the year 2010 or so, most of the major buildings would be demolished, the plutonium consolidated and sealed behind thick layers of concrete. All but 300 acres of the 6,500-acre site would be decontaminated and released for other uses, including recreation and commerce. The ambitious plans face opposition from local activists. But even Silverman's critics pay him grudging homage. Says Ken Korkia of the Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board, a watchdog group: "He has taken charge and assumed responsibility." If anyone can get the job done, it seems, it's the improbably unbureaucratic Mark Silverman.

--Reported by Richard Woodbury/Rocky Flats