Just as the Bush administration is gearing up new nuclear weapons production at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and a series of big projects involving the leftovers of the most toxic weapons man has created at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a dose of reality has crept in. It came in the form of a verdict from a Denver jury that concluded that 13,000 property owners around the old Rocky Flats nuclear plant had been lied to and had their homes devalued.

The two companies that managed Rocky Flats, the awful DOE plant that built plutonium bomb triggers until the 1980s, were found to have exposed nearby homes to plutonium “through their negligence, endangering people’s health and contaminating their property” the federal jury said.

Aiken, South Carolina – In this polite, genteel world, one does not discuss dirty laundry in public and the inelegant nuclear bomb plant located here is this community’s dirty laundry. This attitude adds to a surreal aspect to discussion of the facility here.

This bucolic city of horse people, beautiful old winter estates, golf courses and well-heeled retirees stands in stark contrast to what lies 18 miles south. Drive out Highway 19 and you will run into the biggest headache leftover from the Cold War: the Savannah River nuclear weapons facility, or as the locals call it “the bomb plant.” The site produced all the nation’s plutonium and tritium for the Cold War –and has become its own ground zero. It began in the pressure of the Cold War. Old timers who worked at the plant in the early 1950s remember when five reactors were built five miles apart (so Soviet bombers could not knock them all out unless they nuked each reactor) at a facility covering 312 square miles. Employees at the plant did not give much thought to releasing radiation or dealing with the deadly waste that is a byproduct of making thermonuclear weapons. The old reactors churned out weapons-grade plutonium that was shipped to Colorado and Texas for assembly into bombs. By the 1990s the process had produced more plutonium than we would ever need and the facility became a center for refurbishing the weapons.