DENVER (AP) — A new round of soil testing near a former nuclear weapons plant outside Denver found no radioactivity above the cleanup standard.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Friday released the results of tests on 48 soil samples from the route of planned trails at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is on the buffer zone around a plant that manufactured plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons.
Earlier tests from a different part of the buffer zone found elevated levels of plutonium, while a second test from the same area showed lower levels. The sample in those tests was from the path of a planned highway, outside the wildlife refuge.
Rocky Flats made plutonium triggers for nuclear warheads from 1952 until 1989 and then underwent a $7 billion cleanup.