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 available on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, and will be screened this Sunday, April 26 at the Arvada Center - along with a new art exhibit running through May 10.
You can watch the film’s trailer here.
