The clocks stopped in Nagasaki at 11:02 a.m.

The force of the manmade blast on Aug. 9, 1945, was estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people. The plutonium at the bomb’s core was produced in wartime secrecy in Washington state at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Today people in the Tri-Cities are promoting the idea of converting Hanford’s B Reactor, which developed that plutonium, into a federally funded museum.

Certainly, the technology of that era holds a contemporary fascination. On rare occasions when Hanford opens B Reactor for tours, visitors quickly fill the 300 available spots. But the proposal, which involves persuading the National Park Service to create a museum on this site, does not look promising.

Just four and a half hours to the west, another federally funded visitor’s center, this one commemorating an act of nature, will be permanently closed Nov. 5.

The Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center, which opened in 1993 at a cost of $11.5 million, has grown too expensive for the U.S. Forest Service to maintain.

This center focuses on the ecological recovery of the landscape since Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption. According to the Columbian newspaper in Vancouver, Wash., it needs expensive updating; window repairs alone could cost $1 million.

At Hanford, a bleak landscape awaits those who travel to B Reactor. According to the Seattle Times, it stands 120 feet in the air above the sagebrush near the Columbia River. Inside, visitors can see the face of the reactor’s core, surrounded by tubes for 2,004 fuel rods. They can view the office of Italian-born physicist Enrico Fermi.

Those who favor a new museum there point out that it would cost $16 million to “cocoon” the reactor’s radioactive core in steel and concrete while scientists figure out how to dismantle it safely. Yet it seems unlikely that a multimillion-dollar savings in the U.S. Energy Department could be converted into funds for a new museum in the National Park Service budget.

And if the federal government can’t afford to maintain the Coldwater Ridge Visitor Center at Mount St. Helens, it’s unlikely to be able to maintain this new museum.

Proponents describe this museum as a way to promote the nuclear industry. That’s not likely to do justice to the profound ethical and moral questions that surround the history of B Reactor.

For that, travelers might consider flying to Nagasaki. In the city where the clocks stopped, a museum devotes itself not to the wonders of nuclear age technology, but to the deep and universal human desire for world peace.