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Annual Hanford tours to start April 17

In this Nov. 12, 2015, file photo, fourth-grade students from White Bluffs Elementary School help local historians and politicians raise the National Parks Service flag for the first time at Hanford’s B Reactor, near Richland. (Sarah Gordon / Tri-City Herald)
Associated Press

RICHLAND – The annual tours of the Hanford portion of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park will start on April 17.

Registration for the popular tours opens online at 8 a.m. Monday.

The Tri-City Herald reported that about 14,000 bus seats are available to tour either Hanford’s historic B Reactor or the old Hanford town site.

The town site tour takes visitors to areas inhabited by settlers and tribes before they were evicted in 1943 to make way for the secret nuclear weapons project. Hanford was one of three Manhattan Project locations where workers raced to create a nuclear weapon before Germany.

The B Reactor tours take visitors to the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor. It produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, to end World War II.