For some, the story of Rocky Flats, one of the most disgraceful episodes in the annals of America's interaction with the atom, is ancient history. For others, it's a current event. For Kristen Iversen, it's a burden she lives with, physically and psychologically, every day of her life. Iversen is the author of a new book on the subject -- Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, a striking tale of innocence in a time and a place of great danger. It's the story of an American family buying into the myth of nuclear safety, a story of an abuse of trust for which our government still hasn't fully atoned.

We saw last March in Japan, after the devastating earthquake and tsunami, the ever-present danger of exposing the instruments of nuclear power and weaponry to the natural world. Just last week, the Defense Department launched the Operation Tomodachi Registry website, designed, in its words, to provide "location-based radiation dose estimate reports for adults and children comprising the DoD-affiliated population on or near mainland Japan following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011." Here's what the Pentagon announcement also said:

After extensive environmental monitoring and analysis, it has been determined that none of the nearly 70,000 members of the DoD-affiliated population (service members, DoD civilian employees and contractors, and family members of service members and civilian employees) who were on or near the mainland of Japan between March 12 and May 11, 2011, are known to have been exposed to radiation at levels associated with adverse medical conditions.

Some will choose to believe this. Others won't. But no one should evaluate such claims in the absence of the context and perspective offered by the events of September 11, 1957. With that in mind, I conducted the following online interview with Iversen:

COHEN: Let's start with September 11, 1957 and the fire in Building 71. In your book, you write:

The men knew not to use water on a plutonium fire. The risk of the blue flash of a criticality, or nuclear chain reaction, was too great. There would likely be no explosion --simply the blue flash signaling the surge of neutron radiation fatal to everyone in the immediate vicinity. But they were desperate. They began using water. For a moment it seemed to work. Then suddenly the air pressure dropped. There was silence, and then a deafening blast... The force twisted the plenum's steel frame, destroying most of the filters, and blew the lead cap off the 152-foot smokestack. Flames shot more than two hundred feet above the rim."

As you look back now on that day, and upon the research you did about it, what strikes you the most about how close we all came to being contaminated?

IVERSEN: The Denver area was, in fact, contaminated. This was a devastating fire. It completely destroyed 620 filters as well as most of the measuring equipment that would reveal how much plutonium was actually released. Those filters had not been changed in four years, and they contained a great deal of plutonium and other particulate. After the fire, plutonium was detected as far away as 30 miles from the plant. That extends well into the Denver area. A school 12 miles from Rocky Flats had heavy plutonium contamination in the soil. And the plume from the 1957 fire traveled, of course, far beyond the Denver metro area. It didn't stop at the border.