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And then, the Denver Post article it also links:

...another Building 771 employee, Don Gable, died of brain cancer at age 31, in 1980, after working part of every day with his head 6 inches from a plutonium nitrate pipe. The government lost the dead man's brain before an autopsy could check for radiation. One storage tank area was so plagued with leaks that workers called it the "snake pit" and dreaded the shifts when they were assigned to clean it. And then there was Room 141, which contained a pump that squirted so often that low areas in the floor sometimes flooded with 2 inches of plutonium nitrate. Cleanup crews managed to drain the room but then stopped work after failing to reduce radioactivity below the level that reads "infinity" on standard plant instruments. The door finally was welded shut in 1972, ... Room 141 was abandoned so quickly that a peek through the window today shows a jackhammer still stuck in the floor.

Plutonium shavings can catch on fire just by being piled in the wrong shape or being exposed to the wrong chemical. At Rocky Flats, the wrong thing happened a lot. From 1953 to 1990, workers reported 430 fires at Building 771 alone.

"If we get 4 liters of this liquid, we're in the power business," said Kelly Trice, manager of the Building 771 cleanup. "Even a half an aspirin of plutonium is a major contamination problem. It would peg out the meters."

So they'd be careful with it, right?

Well, they were. In a manner of speaking.

During complex chemical operations, so much plutonium nitrate dripped onto the bottom of gloveboxes that workers faced the risk of criticality - an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction that sprayed a deadly stream of neutrons. To prevent criticality, workers did the nuclear equivalent of pulling the plug on a bathtub. They used a "crit valve" to dump plutonium nitrate from the glovebox to the factory floor. That prevented a criticality disaster from ever occuring at Rocky Flats. "When you got more than 2 inches of liquid in a box, you'd have a choice - you either have a criticality, or you have a cleanup job," said Don Sabac, a Rocky Flats worker since 1961. "You always chose the cleanup job." For a worker, that meant dropping to his or her hands and knees and scrubbing the plutonium solution off the floor with industrial cleanser, called K.W., and strengthened paper towels called Kimwipes.

Not for the workers, though.

And even during the cleanup, when they were vastly more aware of the consequences and much more careful, mistakes happened:

On Feb. 2, 1999, a worker was cutting apart a plutonium furnace with a band saw inside a glovebox. ... The blade slashed his left index finger to the bone. To prevent the wound from contaminating other workers, the man's hand was stuffed inside a plastic bag and sealed with tape.

They got him urgent medical attention and did their best to remove heavy metals from his system, but: