We tried to get something tha that we should be talking about.

There should be signage.

There should be educatio for people moving in the area.

So they kno this was previously this plant.

And this is what occurred here.

And it's part of our history in the U.S..

It's part of our history in Colorado.

I mean, it's so weird.

People feel like the come on, if you grew up out there, you know, everyone's assumes that, you know, and it's like, this is not a true statement.

People do not know you know, people do not know.

Why would you know?

They don't teach you about there's no signage.

Why would it be like, poof, you're born with this knowledge about it?

The Rocky Flats plant makes plutonium parts for nuclear weapons.

Last May 11th, tw buildings were gutted by fire.

Scientists recently found traces of radioactive plutonium.

People who live near that plant may be exposed to a cancer hazard.

Wastes burned.

Dumped into landfills.

Discharged.

Industry.

Some of the highest levels o radioactive water in the world.

When is enough?

Enough, people?

We have been lied to and run by people living near the plant are breathing tiny particles of plutonium.

Allegations of a conspiracy by plant officials repeatedly denied that working at the weapons plant.

Words like nightmare and scandal where you should say there was no cause for alarm.

I don't like to call anyone liars.

Let's just say that they have stretched the credibility gap beyond repair.

To.

All these notebooks and things that I have here.

I kept up with that.

And I keep those as a reminder to myself of what went on at Rocky Flats.

I was even in some of the because I always stuck my nose right in there.

I get a call at work and they said, hey, we're from Rocky Flats, and we wanted to know if you were still interested in working at coming to work at Rocky Flats.

And I said, well, how much this pay?

I didn't know what Rocky Flats did.

So I went out for an interview.

He's well there's an awful lot of lifting involved in this job.

And you're kind of small.

I don't kno if you can do this work or not.

And I said, what?

Can he do it?

It was a guy sitting there.

He was smaller than me.

And I said, can he do it?

And they said, well, yeah, he's a man.

He can do it.

I said, well, he's smaller than me.

If he could do it, I could do it.

They gave you a ful indoctrination when you started.

And they told you.

You do not discuss what you do at this plant.

You don't talk about it even to your family.

If anyone was curious about our jobs we were supposed to report it.

So I never told my husband what I did out there.

I think he thought I worked in an office or something.

You know, we weren't making baby buggies.

I just ran across this picture the other day and I thought, oh my gosh, how on earth did I survive it?

These are people who handle the material, and most of these people are passed on now.

At Rocky Flats, our plant is closed.

And now they've made it into a wildlife refuge.

However, plutonium has a half life of 24,000 years.

People are going to forget about it, and they're going to say, what was Rocky Flats?

Well, it's still out there.

I had gone down and to the bar here, and I was carrying a beer, and my wife got a cal from my supervisor at the plant that I come home right away, and I called him and says, we need you now.

Right now.

We need you right now.

And I said, well, I had a couple of beers and I don't know if I should come out because, you know, they always told u not to go to work with any beer, you know, or any alcohol or drugs or anything.

And I said, I don't know where you said you coming out now.

I said, all right.

So we went out there.

When we got out there, but there was blac smoke coming out of the stack.

76 building.

Production of nuclear warheads for missiles has been completely halted at the AEC.

Concedes plutonium particles have been blown downwind ten miles from here.

One of the nation's key atomic bomb plants may be endangerin the people of Denver, Colorado.

Is there any danger, at the present?

None whatsoever.

There was a very slight release from the fire.

However, we're convinced it over the years and.

At the amount we found so far, perhaps 100 to 1000 times the amount you should expect.

Perhaps some of the incidents that have happened here is the major contributor to this.

Bomb.

Was our.

Opening up a former nuclear weapon plant for recreation and trails.

But after all these years, is Rocky Flats safe?

Our position is that the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge is safe for our workers and for our visitors.

Beyond that, we rely upon the subject matter experts and put together this service.

I get a lot of phone calls from members of the public.

And the questio they always have is, is it safe?

If I was to hike or bike on the site, can you 100% guarantee me that my health wouldn't be at risk?

And one of the thing that I always say to people is the term safe is a is a word that I don't like.

Because was it safe for me to take the bus to this interview today?

Was it safe for you to drive here?

You know, those are hard questions.

So what we do talk about as we talk about here is the calculated risk.

And where is.

I think when people come out here and see what's here, they're going to start to wonder what all the hubbub is about.

There's this belief that it's some kind of boiling brain morass of evil stuff, and that's just not the case.

You just drove across the place yourself, and you saw what's there.

It's not that.

It never was that.

What used to be a concrete jungle of buildings is now just open skies and field full of grass and wildflowers.

It's undeniable beauty spreading over 5000 acres.

There are now houses nearby and big plans for a wildlife refuge and public recreation, plus a visitor center that would welcome tens of thousands every year.

We used to joke about it when I worked out there.

Oh, yeah?

When rockslide closes down they're going to put amusement park right here.

That's crazy.

It's insanity.

It's insanity.

Rocky flats was a secret place where they made weapons of mass destruction.

And so they didn't advertise what they did out there.

If you go back and record that history, you'll find that people who did know would actually come to Rocky Flats and protest because they felt what Rocky Flats was doing was harmful, and it would bring about destruction, which they were right in that.

But work went on as usual.

If the plant were to operate for 70 years and the population of Denve were exposed to that operation, there's the maximu possible city that approximately one human being would receive, a, health effect or a genetic defect from the plant.

In other words, at this time, health effects are estimated to be too small to measure.

We were all always reassured.

Certainly there is no danger to the public.

You'd have nothing to worry about, and it covers up many lies.

And the populace is, in a sense, a guinea pig.

Even though we never have a nuclear war, it was always called the top secret plant.

You know, the top secret energy plant.

People didn't even know it was.

You know, it was never called a weapons plant or a nuclear weapons plant to have been working.

And this was a chanc to really say we mean business.

They had operated in near-total secrecy without any public scrutiny for decades.

Yeah.

Our objection isn't with them.

It's with a policy, a policy.

They don't have any more control over than we do.

The plant might still be making plutonium trigger if we hadn't done what we did.

We think the power of the peopl is run around the little close Rocky Flats and other facilities like this Intel in this.

We're going to be back and back again with more and more people.

They can't find enough rooms in our jails.

Go.

Oh, like.

That.

The controversy over nuclear energy drew almost 10,000 protesters, thousand of that on nuclear protesters.

But more people were listening.

A lot more people are taking the series to the dance factory and the people that write down on it are murderers.

Murderers.

Because the people who live down there in those houses are dying of cancer.

They're dying of cancer caused by that plant for the second day.

Hundreds of protesters demonstrated against nuclear power, but today they were stopped by the power of the law.

I have to confess something to you.

I have never seen more people arrested in one day.

And I saw arrested today.

In fact, more peopl might have been arrested today than during the entire seven month marathon process.

The Rocky Flats last summer.

With dozen or hundreds of people in jail.

The number is growing.

Where is this headed?

It stirred the pot considerably, but it wasn't clear what would happen next.

For the third year in a row.

We are here.

It was the biggest protest here ever.

A human chain 17 miles long was almost completed this afternoon.

230 people were hauled away in the Colorado protest.

An extraordinary story is unfolding at this top.

Secret installation of FBI, FBI, FBI, FBI agents are at the flats right now investigating the possibility that Rocky Flats covered up potentially deadly pollution and then lied about it.

The FBI, the EPA, the Justice Department all have investigators inside this plant right now.

They're going through records.

They're questioning employees to find out if Rocky Flats has been poisoning us and lying about it.

I trying to call.

We were raided by the FBI, and there was a grand jury in 1989.

That happened in 1989 because of illegal practices going on by the management of Rocky Flats.

They were doing all sorts of illegal things that harm the environment that harmed the workers, that harmed the public.

They they contaminated the lakes, the streams and the aquifers.

A 116 page FBI affidavit alleges improper and illegal disposal of dozens of hazardous wastes radioactive and chemical wastes, burned, dumped into landfills, discharged into streams on at least two occasion into creeks, leading to drinking water supplies for metropolitan Denver just a few miles away.

I didn't grow up thinking that the governmen was going to do this to people.

We're not talking about, you know, kitchen cleaners.

You know, we're talking about the most toxic substance known to man.

It was the first known search warran served to the federal facility.

They weren't going to play nice when 75 federal agents armed with a search warrant raided the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons complex near Denver.

The screen of secrecy started to come down.

The company agreed to pa a record fine, $18 million, but no criminal charges were brought against corporate officials.

Now, the grand jur that heard testimony in the case is saying the federal prosecutor let those most responsible for the pollution at Rocky Flats get away.

When you contaminate an area with enough toxic material to kill every man, woman and child in the world.

And they got off with a little $18 millio fine that was actually pre-paid.

That's not justice.

Congressional investigators believe a much broader range of cover up and pollutio charges could have been brought.

They subpoenaed FBI agents who spearheaded the five year federal investigation of the plant.

You solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

I do.

I told them what my findings were.

And with that, I was offered an affidavit that was going to change my testimony.

And I wasn't going to do that.

I didn't.

My superiors have ordered me to lie.

We were investigating the U.S. Department of Energy, but the U.S. Justice Department covered up the truth for years.

The Colorado plant has been accused of mishandling its hazardous radioactive wastes.

Now, a congressional report says the government simply swept the problem under the rug.

The situation there is so bad that the Department of Energy has decided there's nothing left to do but tell the truth so publicly that what happened at Rocky Flats was a terrible mistake.

In October 2005, the Rocky Flats workers completed the ten year, $7 billion accelerated cleanup of Rocky Flats, making it the largest and most successful Superfund cleanup project in U.S. history.

The legacy these workers left behind is a wildlife refuge, a new beginning for the citizens of Colorado.

I'm concerned that even now, people don't know that there was a nuclear facility at Rocky Flats.

Young people.

They don't they don't know about that.

And the workers out there especially the old time workers, were told not to talk about it, not talk about your job.

And a lot of them got sick and died.

So they're not going to talk about it.

When you talk about the Cold War and the history of the Cold War, we often talk about it as though it was a war without and casualties without any American casualties.

In this scrapbook, there's a lot of obituaries.

There's one a lot of obituaries.

If there's a couple more.

My friend that worked out there that died young ages, they shouldn't have died so young.

They died of many, many kinds of cancers, brain tumors.

I felt like we were really safe when we were out there.

I felt safe.

But that don't necessarily mean it was at the time.

You believe one thing, and then as time goes on, you find out, by golly gee whiz, things weren't quite as safe as I thought they were.

I developed cancer from working at Rocky Flats afte I had been there for 15 years.

I developed breast cancer.

I took off for about six weeks, had the message, got me, came back to work and worked there another seven years before Rocky Flats closed.

My husband Charlie worked at there for about ten years, and he was a chemical operator at Rocky Flats.

Charlie got cancer of his kidneys.

He also had bladder cancer and liver cancer.

He fought cancer for 12 years.

A study showed an unusually high number of deaths from brain cancer and other tumors among workers at Colorado's Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant.

Department of energy officials expressed concern over those figures, but said studies showed no connection between those deaths and plutonium.

One of the most toxic substances known, the people who worked in these nuclear facilities felt all of them.

I can say that being a worker out there, that they were helping out our country, and we felt that our country would protect us and provide for us.

They didn't do it.

Sorry.

Well, it still makes me mad because how can they do that to the people that protected them?

It's wrong.

I'm doctor Mark Johnson.

I'm the executive director o Jefferson County Public Health and have been in that position for 27 years.

I really didn't know much about Rocky Flats until I started, but when I started in 1990, they had recently, of course, had the FBI raid.

I also found a number of articles and thing that had been written by Doctor Carl Johnson, who had been one of my predecessors.

I actually tried to contact his wife, called her and was trying to get some information, and when she found I was from Jefferson County, she said, you killed my husband and hung up on me.

So I knew there were some strong feelings around what had happened.

There.

If radioactive plutonium dust has been blown near to where human beings breathe, has it been picked up by their bodies?

Doctor Johnson believes Rocky Flats is bad for his county's health, and for several years he's been measuring levels of radioactive plutoniu in the local soil to prove it.

Did you consider that, residential development near the plant would be hazardous or dangerous?

Yes.

Would you tell us that?

Yes.

I feel that to put, people in this area known to be contaminated would significantly increase their risk of, leukemia, cancer, birth defects, and also the rate of general ill health due to chromosome injury.

I was having a lot of health problems, and I started to Google my symptoms.

I hit return, and some are on the list.

Something came up with nuclear waste as a cause, and I was like, That's interesting.

I went down to the Denver library, and I looke and I saw where Rocky Flats was, and then I looked and found my address, and I was just blown away with like, oh, my God.

Like, that was my closest neighbor.

I had no idea.

Like, I saw the lights, but I never knew what it was.

So it's kind of like this.

I had this huge moment.

Tiffany Hansen just kind of out of the blue, contacted us and came and met with us and told us about Rocky Flats and the Downwinder and what she was trying to do, and asked us to help her create a health survey just to try to see if is there an issue here.

Is there a problem because people in the community felt like they had long term health issues?

She did, and felt like the state of Colorado was not being receptiv or responsive to their concerns.

I got hundreds of emails right away when I started this from people with their stories about the illnesses that were happening, but then starting to see if there was connections there.

I thought there'd be issues, but I had no idea what I was going to see.

Almost 2000 people responded to the Rocky Flats Downwinders Health survey online.

There were many kinds of illnesses, and almost 90 cases of cancer were reported.

My mother had liver cancer.

My dad had spinal cancer.

My sister had bone cancer.

Oddly enough, we all ended up with it.

After swimming around and recreating in this like.

You know, the first cancer, it's like, okay, well, it happens the second cancer is like, okay, well, that happens too.

But the third cancer is like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is just too much.

Let's make sure my way is okay.

I lost me here and it was very traumatic because they told me I wouldn't lose my hair.

And so it came out over 24 hours.

And that was probably the worst day.

Almost all this.

I'm constantly getting emails, I'm getting calls.

People have these supe rare illnesses and will report high rates that have been reported to us about things like in the case of Britney, she's, you know, found over 140 young women that have been diagnosed with breast cancer.

It was heartbreaking to hear these stories, but also to realize that these people have been sufferin and no one's listened to them.

No one supported them.

The system has not even acknowledged that what they have is real.

Shaughnessy McNeely, who is volunteering with her organization, has her master's in nursing.

And, her father was a CU football coach.

They moved to the neighborhood, literally on the outside the east entrance to Rocky Flats.

So closest neighborhoo to the flats on the east side, which is downwind and downstream.

And he was diagnosed with a cardiac angio sarcoma, which is so rare that it was really hard for them to diagnose it.

It was very hard for them to treat it.

A fe weeks after my dad was diagnosed through various team circumstances, we found out a little boy had the exact same cancer.

And at that point in time, our oncologist said, statistically, this isn't possible.

And we said, well, should we move?

And he just he was a man of few words, and he just kind of shook his head like, statistically, this isn't possible.

I remember him saying to me, Shaughnessy, you've got to go Erin Brockovich now.

He's like, you've got to figure out what is going on.

If there is no relationship to Rocky Flats, then we need to know that if there is, then we need to know that.

To me, it suddenly sounded like it was a modern day murder mystery.

Medical murder mystery that was not being addressed.

People feel a sense of hop that they're being listened to.

You know, on the other hand, there's not a lot of hope around this issue because they feel like wha they're up against is so huge.

The Colorado Department of Public Health has been the ones who've done research in the past on health effects from Rocky Flats.

So we asked for a meeting to sit down and talk to them.

And the first thing they said to us wa they considered us adversaries and they were hostile.

I think that was the hardes thing for me to realize is that they're not working with their citizens.

They don't support us i investigating our health issues.

They didn't want us to be doing this, which actually kind of makes you want to do it more.

I have a lot of friends and colleagues at the state health department that that I like and trust.

I particularly put faith in the mortality studies that we have out there on the cancer registry that we have that shows where cancer has been in the state of Colorado.

The state healt survey of ten communities around Rocky Flats shows no significant difference in cancer rates when compare to the rest of the metro area.

We've seen pretty consistent evidence, that there doesn't appear to be an increased risk of cancer in the communities around Rocky Flats.

And this will not be wel accepted by some of my friends.

But as as I worke with the health advisory panel and I watched the state health department working with them, I do.

I did get a sense that they were they were being.

They were being as honest as they as they could be, that they were doing what needed to be done.

But I do think that all of the money that came into the state and to the state health department from the Department of Energy did have some influence on what some of those studies showed or what some of the conclusions were.

To the degree that I would again like to see an independent review of some things.

That would not be well accepted by my friend at the state health department.

So with this 500 times background radiation and knowing that one particle could cause cancer.

Help me understand how she stands on.

It's safe.

A determination of safe is really a I. I value judgment on a particular person.

So we don't use that.

We we try very hard not to use the term safe.

See, I'm frustrated here tryin to find out what is dangerous.

Where where does it where does plutonium contamination in the soil become dangerous and to whom?

Our response to such inquiry is usually that we've not seen anything that spells a health problem.

But I think we're on thin ice when we say that.

Hazards from contaminants.

Now we're talking about 1 in 1,000,000 excess cancer risk.

You trip walking on the trail.

I mean, that's the hazard that you're dealing with.

It's stung by a bee.

Get attacked by a mountain lion.

The federal government and state have maintained there's a nearly 1 in 1,000,000 risk of cancer by visiting this site.

For people who have kids for people who live in the area.

Do you believe it's safe?

I do believe it's safe.

I've taken my kids there.

I'm out there all the time.

My folks are out there all the time.

If I was concerned about it, we wouldn't be doing that.

I think that the peace community, once they got what they wanted.

Rocky flats has been closed down.

Materials have been shipped off site has been cleaned up.

A brand new community is sprouting up in the shadow of the former nuclear weapons facility.

So is it safe to build so close by?

When you buy a house there or send your children to school so close to Rocky Flats?

I probably would not at this time.

No.

Most of the studies that are done to say this is safe are based on sort of life exposure.

Theoretically, you can ge several particles in your lungs, and it has nothing to do with life exposure.

But they are and they'r emitting alpha gamma radiation.

And you can get a cancer from just a very few elemental aspects of the nuclear material.

So to me, it's not so much how long have I been exposed, but have I been exposed?

And I choose not to be exposed.

A spokesman for the developers of Candela has told us the critic are using disproven allegations.

Mission formation and fear mongering.

David Wood didn't like the idea of living in Colorado's nuclear shadow.

So before he built a home near Rocky Flats, he launched his own study to make sure it was safe.

If I googled the topic of Rocky Flats, it was completely dominate by stuff of very dubious utility and, extremely alarmist in tone.

I tried to assess the situation for myself, and I did that by taking three pretty big soil samples from various parts of our lot to the Colorado Public Health Lab that has a long history of measuring such stuff.

And all three of those sample came back less than the minimum detectable amount.

In other words, it was consistent with there being no plutonium at all.

All this stuff about radiation and exposure and things like that.

But something I did for my own curiosity.

But it's partially to support the opening of the wildlife preserve.

I mean, that's logically a separate issue, whether or not it's safe to live around here as opposed to going into the wildlife reserve.

But they're really part of the same thing.

People looked at the cleanup and said, this isn't ideal, but it did the job right.

And so you cannot find, i my opinion, a nuclear engineer or a nuclear physicist who would say this is a bad thing.

I wouldn't live anywhere near that.

We'll find him, because that debate was settled a long time ago during the cleanup.

You know, when it's not safe or not even remotely.

Some where along the lines, somebody made a determination of what they thin a safe amount of plutonium is.

And what is the same amount of waste down here?

Well, that's easy.

My crew was some of the best physicists on the planet.

We handled every environmental sample taken out there from my tuna deposit.

Six.

That I saw on the news.

A guy was a doctor out there with a commercially available Geiger counter saying, look, nothing but background here.

On the.

Yep, that's what that is going to pick up.

You could hold with only one particle for it in your hand next to it.

And that Geiger counter would not detect that.

One of the odd things that we had happening was there'd be an area that would be remediated and new topsoil wiped down with guns, and everything' good, and go back the next year, sample the same area.

And it was screaming.

It was returning home.

And, we figured out what was happening was earthworms were being killed, bringing what we had buried back up to the surface.

One of the questions we get is what's left behind.

And there are in the d.o.e.

retained land in the former production areas.

They're there stuff there.

And I'm not just talking residual contamination.

There's building foundations.

There's all about processed waistlines.

And around that, there are contaminants.

Now, that's all of that is anywhere between 6ft and 65ft below grade.

Point.

With all my experience and my years knowing how much stuff is an old building, especially in 71.

They're not going to get it all out in that time.

They say they are.

If they do, if they do, the, people around here.

But kind of be careful.

There was crud dump there, spille there, leak there for decades.

Okay.

You're not going to clean it up.

The job is not going to be done.

It's going to be far from done.

And in fact, the most dangerous part of it is still going to be left.

There's stuff buried out there that would scare me.

I would never go out on that plants right now.

Just like how they've treated the people.

Out of sight, out of mind.

Just buried.

It's just covered over with dirt.

Garden variety dirt.

I saw them.

They made it into a wildlife refuge.

Say that.

Oh, come on and ride your bicycle and take a picnic lunch.

That's wrong.

That place should never, ever be inhabited by human beings.

Is there any doubt that plutonium is a hazardous substance?

No.

It's the most toxic substance known to mankind.

That is a scientific, undisputable fact.

So why are they saying it's safe when they've said, here is what is out there?

How can they say it's safe?

The refuge was never remediated.

They said they did nothing.

Same as the offsite lands.

There was no remediation.

When we have people rewriting the history and changing the events, I don't know what the answer i except to bring out all of the information that we ca and put it in the public domain so that people have recourse from what the government stance is to what is reality.

The knowledge that I have and I think I should, I should tell you that I am constrained by the federal government.

Any type of public activity is not a good idea of what I know about the plan.

There is concern that if the area opens, there's no warnin about the potential health risk.

Karen, here in northern Jefferson County, this piece of art is one of the only remaining symbols of what actually went on here during the Cold War.

Earlier this week, we heard from the state that there is plutonium on the land that could open up to the public, but they say it's not enough to increase health risks.

There has been a suggestion that you need to warn people, but from a local government perspective, if a warning is necessary, then there' a whole other host of problems that have to be addressed.

The great science for everybody.

You know.

It's all right.

Okay.

You're going to do that okay.

But if you can do some mor signs, we need to do more, okay.

More science.

Because if we want a complete sound man, as John said whe they composited these samples.

Right.

Basically what they di is average down the plutonium.

Much damage has been done, but that doesn't mean we turn our backs on former residents or workers.

We have lots of different campaigns and we'd love to get people involved.

So, you know, you've probably heard today this term plutonium triggers but that's what was manufactured rocket gas.

What that means.

And I do not believe we have t we have gotten the truth about what's going on in Rocky Flats and what is left at Rocky Flats.

A packed crowd came to hear the plans for opening up the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge.

There is a significant amount of funding that's been secured for these projects.

That includes building and building, building and entrance, road parkin lots, trails within the refuge.

We're not here to debat whether it's going to be open.

So the question for you all tonight is, are there other topics that you'd like to see in these exhibits, in these panels?

And are there certain aspects of Rocky Flats that you'd like the interpretation to focus on more than others?

I'm looking with 40 years.

Most of the time I know what like so there are some things that are missing from the presentation, and it's the morale in the room.

Let me stop you right now, but I want yes.

Yes, please.

Why don't you want to finish this off?

Come on.

Come on.

No.

That's this.

This is not just insane.

It's crazy.

I should not be going public.

I'm not saying.

Okay.

For the will over time.

Why isn't anybody talking about the fires that happened on the site?

Why isn't anybody talking about this fire that we don't even have?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we have.

Right.

Go to the experts over here.

We got to ask.

Your side, you know, and they're on the wrong side.

I know what's what and what.

Is.

Not.

Some people left that meeting tonight feeling like they were not heard.

The plans to open this sign back up are moving forward.

The community has heard a lot from government agencies who assure them the land is safe.

But tonight they held their own meeting without those officials.

We heard from an FBI agent, a former employee, and professors who have studie Rocky Flats more than 200 years of experience.

And they sa Rocky Flats will never be safe and people need to know about it.

We as a group have literally centuries of field work, lab work, forensic science, investigation of the site.

We found that plutonium was widely spread all over Rocky Flats.

It is considered in chemistry the most dangerous element that exists.

The contamination that exists on the planet sit today will remain there forever.

Any type of public activity is not a good idea.

If you make a decision to approve this, you are assigning some people for death.

Go very carefully in terms of exposing the public to the contaminated soils of Rocky Flats.

These soils have been mapped and the contamination is indeed there.

I will tell you in terms of your comments that frankly, I disagree.

You know, we have a matter of opinion.

It's a matter of fact, you.

Well, we have a rocky plat stewardship council.

Billions of dollars have been spent on the site.

You know, I'm I'm probably going to put greater weight into what they're telling me than what you're telling me.

Trust.

But verify.

Okay.

And I think that there is a high degree of trust and verification continues to this day in terms of the stewardship Council, in terms of the monitoring that goes on.

So, yes, I would say that because we have trusted but verified.

I feel very confident.

I have come to the conclusion that the the fears are real, and whether or not the concerns are technically valid is not important.

What's important is that these are real people with real concerns who want real answers.

If you look at i and says, well, the data doesn't support your concerns, what are you worried about?

Then you're actually missin what is humanistic about this, this issue and that is the that this is real to them.

And this is somethin they need to better understand.

There's lessons that we learned from places like Rocky Flats and from, how we damage lands, but also then how we come back and we clean up lands and we move forwar into the future so that we have tons and tons of data that show that using this property, it presents the normal risks that we just talk about slips, trips, falls you know, it's it's open land.

It's essentially native grass.

Native lands out here.

One of the biggest concerns I have is that the history of Rocky Flats is being rewritten.

And within ten years that that whole, purpose of that site has been lost.

The historical memory is getting lost.

I've never had to really answer any of my concerns, and neither has the public.

That's why we have to put things formally into the record, to show future generations that we were all concerned, that we never stoppe that concern about Rocky Flats.

And you look at the age group of the people that are vocal.

I spoke of these people in their 80s, and they're still coming ou and saying, this is not right.

This is not right.

It's not clean.

Public is being given wrong information.

Plutoniu has a half life of 24,000 years.

The half life of memory by contrast, is a much briefer thing.

The contamination at Rocky Flats will long outlive our efforts to control or even remember it.

Like the waste trenche and the rumors and the memories, Rocky Flats is contested.

History is now invisible to the naked eye.

The definition of success for the Department of Energy was to take the place apart and leave us with this expansive prairie, that you wouldn't know anything happened there.

So more than many places there, there is no monument to what happened there.

The only monument are people, stories.

It was very interesting when I was reading about nuns that were being arrested for protesting and all of these things, because I was thinking, wow, like, you can just I could go drive up there in ten minutes right now, and I would look like nothing ever existed there.

And yet at that time, it was such a hot topic and people were getting arrested.

Busloads of people like laying on the railroad tracks.

Nowadays, we don't even act like it even existed.

So it's very strang how that's kind of the pendulum has swung from being a hot topic, where people are willing to risk jail time to now something we just don't talk about.

I think we have a responsibility to those of us who remember what it was and what it is and what Half-Life means.

The Half-Life of radioactive substances and radioactive contamination in the soil and water.

We have a responsibility to transmit that to future generations.

The Half-Life is 24,000 years.

That's a thousand generations.

That's crazy.

That's whe half of the substance that's out there will decay.

But then it will b another 24,000 before the next half decays.

No human institutions have come close to lasting that long, and the danger is compounded by the longevity of it.

We need a new generation of people to pick it up and carry it for the next period of time.

You know, that's coming to a point that the story's going to be gone.

You know, I don't have all that many years left.

And Lipski is all of us.

I'm not going to back down.

The games that they played in the past.

If they think God's going to dissuade me, they've got another thing coming forward to get it out to the public.

You're going to see this new tonight controversy over whether Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge should open to the public this summer.

This week, Jeff Coe's top public health official said no and filed a court motion.

I wish the federal government would learn that it is better to be transparent than to cover things up.

It's not so much the crime or the problem at first or the mistakes that are made.

It's the cover of.

They didn't bother to look into the future and see what's going to happen to the people coming along when they forget about Rocky Flats.

Rocky Flats National Wildlif Refuge is now allowing visitors, but protesters also showed up saying the land is still too contaminated.

01010 Garvey Park.

Rocky flats continues with the new legal effort to unseal grand jury records from nearly 30 years ago.

Today, it is not Nationa Wildlife Refuge, but remember, decades ago, Rocky Flats was a nuclear weapons plan where nuclear waste was buried.

There are fear the ground is still contaminated with nuclear waste.

And the company that wants to drill there claims it's focusing on area outside the refuge boundaries.

The reason some people are outraged with this idea of drilling here near Rocky Flats and potentially fracking underneath this land, is what used to sit a few hundred yards back that way.

A plant that made nuclear weapons for decades.

The United State Department of Justice can't find more than 60 boxes for a 27 year old criminal investigatio into a Colorado nuclear plant.

The files detail safety and environmental violations at the rock wall International plant.

Well, these are the first soil samples taken in 13 years from a former nuclear weapons facility in Jefferson County.

Crews are collecting these samples from the old Rocky Flats area, where triggers for nuclear bombs were once made.

A new radiation scare at Rocky Flats.

Elevated plutonium levels have been found.

The state says that samples showed five times the amount o plutonium considered acceptable.

It's what people living nearby have been fearing, even before the plans for a new parkway started.

There.