Rocky Flats: The Nuclear Facility that Couldn’t Stop Having Accidents

Rocky Flats was a nuclear facility near my home town of Arvada, Colorado. The facility was part of America’s nuclear production line at the beginning of the cold war. It was in an ideal location that was away from people but still close enough to get workers. The facility was incredibly secretive with workers not revealing what they actually did. Many local residents did not know that the weird plant out of town by the mountains was actually making triggers for nuclear bombs. The facility went through many problems during its run. It had a reputation for hiring anyone with a pulse rather than experts and for having lax safety

When the facility was closed in 1991, a decade long cleanup was begun. When I was a child, they would close I-25 each night to haul all the waste to Wyoming. They used large blue bins to transport the waste and they even invited the public to see demonstrations of these bins to show how they were safe.

I wrote a short story called Windswept Wastes about a fictional worker at the facility who experienced the 1969 plutonium fire. If you’d like to read it please feel free to read it here.

In these videos, Plainly Difficult discusses the 1969 plutonium fire in a pair of awesome videos. Rocky Flats is rarely discussed as much as Hansford here in Washington or facilities in Georgia and Tennessee. I was excited to see someone talking about one of the few facilities to be completely cleaned up.