ARVADA — The Cold War has been over since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, but tucked away in Arvada storage sheds, basements and garages, part of the nuclear legacy of the United States lives on.
Members of a local nonprofit that salvaged thousands of items are searching for a permanent location for the artifacts after years of moving in and out of temporary spaces.
A federal grant of $492,000 to find a permanent space is gone, and board members of the are paying $600 per month out-of-pocket for storage rental and other expenses.
Museum board members and former Rocky Flats workers gathered recently at a storage facility east of Arvada’s Olde Town to take stock of their inventory and talk about the future of the items.
“We need to find a donated secure storage space of around 1,000 square feet somewhere in the Arvada area to house everything,” said museum president Murph Widdowfield. “Our other goal is to find space for a small display so the Rocky Flats Plant can live on and continue educating people.”
Widdowfield said the organization — formed in 2001 — has more than 400 boxes of photographs, maps and drawings along with thousands of items such as glove boxes, Rashig tanks and safety and monitoring equipment.
Former U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard helped the group obtain the $492,000 appropriation in 2007 to jump-start a . Board members say the Department of Energy, which administered the grant, prohibited that money from being used for fundraising.
Instead, the group rented museum space in Arvada for roughly $6,000 a month. The grant dwindled as it became clear the group would be unable to raise significant money on its own, despite land and other monetary grants. The group relocated into an Olde Town office space and — unable to afford rent there — packed up in 2012.
“We’re trying everything we possibly can,” said museum historian Ron Heard. “It’s one of those stories that’s not a happy story — the building of nuclear weapons — but it’s a part of Colorado history.”
Widdowfield said his group has been in contact with others across the country as well as History Colorado, but, for various reasons, other organizations have been unable or unwilling to accept the artifacts.
Larry Wilson, the museum vice president who worked at the plant for 40 years, said the items not only help tell the story of the country’s nuclear legacy, but also the story of Jefferson County.
“It may no longer be in commission, but the products the plant made are still in the nuclear stockpile today,” Wilson said. “It’s important we preserve that history because it’s an integral part of the nation’s major nuclear deterrent.”
At the height of production, the plant employed 4,000 men and women who manufactured plutonium fission cores used to detonate U.S. nuclear bombs.
Scott Surovchak, Rocky Flats legacy site manager for the Department of Energy, said more than 100,000 workers passed through the site in the course of its roughly 50-year history, allowing a middle-class buildout of Arvada, Broomfield and Westminster.
He added the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will use a few of the group’s items for a display in a small commemorative facility to be built at the former plant site,
“This group was kind of at the end of their rope years ago,” Surovchak said. “The current board is different from the original group, which included a bunch of the ‘anti crowd.’ Like a lot of other people with a connection to the site, they want a place to be able to take their grandkids and great-grandkids and say ‘here’s what we did’ and to show the general public the history of the site.”
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