What Rocky Flats meant to the workers who helped create nuclear weapons there during the Cold War
About this episode
The episode discusses the history of Rocky Flats and its impact on workers through a conversation with filmmaker Jeff Gipe.
If you visit the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge northwest of Denver, you see different types of wildlife, miles of hiking and biking trails and acres of rolling prairie. But you don’t see any trace of the astonishing history of what happened there during the Cold War: Rocky Flats was the site of a plant that made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons until it was shuttered in the early 1990s. Officials removed later removed the buildings used in processing plutonium and cleaned up the area. And after a series of sometimes contentious public hearings , the wildlife refuge opened to the public in 2018. Filmmaker Jeff Gipe explores that history in a recent documentary , Half-Life of Memory: America’s Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory . Gipe grew up in nearby Arvada. His father worked at the plant in the 1980s. Gipe says he made the film to remind people of the hazards buried beneath the wide-open spaces of the wildlife refuge, and to share the voices of workers whose lives were affected by the dangerous materials processed at Rocky Flats. Today we’re listening back to Gipe’s conversation with Erin O’Toole, recorded ahead of the film’s premiere in late 2024. The documentary is…
People in this episode
Guest: Jeff Gipe
Topics covered
- Rocky Flats
- nuclear weapons
- Cold War history
- wildlife refuge
- documentary
- worker experiences
Keywords
- Rocky Flats
- nuclear weapons
- Cold War
- documentary
- Jeff Gipe
- Erin O’Toole
- wildlife refuge
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video
Books & works: Half-Life of Memory: America’s Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory
Places: Denver
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