(Radio Iowa) – As the movie “Oppenheimer” opens Thursday, the story of the physicist who developed the first nuclear weapons, a documentary screening tonight (Wednesday) will focus on a role Iowa played in the Manhattan Project.

Ames native and filmmaker Brittany Prater’s documentary, “Uranium Derby,” centers on top-secret experiments that were conducted in her hometown during the 1940s. One source is heard during the movie trailer saying, “On the campus at Iowa State during the war, they were making materials for atomic bombs.”

Prater details how the Ames Laboratory, run by the Department of Energy, at one point flushed high-level radioactive waste down the city’s sanitary-sewer drains. She visits an Ames neighborhood that suffered from what she calls a “cancer epidemic” in the 1990s, where toxic waste was buried, under what eventually became a youth sports complex. Once it went public, she says, the site was hastily cleaned up.

Prater will be at The Varsity Theater in Des Moines for tonight’s 7 P-M showing of the 88-minute documentary and she’ll take questions afterward.