Summary

Tumbleweeds pile up against the fence of the first production reactor built alongside the Columbia River at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in this 1994 photo by Christopher Anderson.

In 1943, the federal government chose Hanford, in Washington state, to make plutonium for the Manhattan Project, a secret wartime effort to build an atomic bomb. That military mission ended in 1988, launching a cleanup effort that continues to this day. In 1994, S-R reporters Karen Dorn Steele and Jim Lynch wrote a five-day series called Wasteland detailing the money spent on Hanford’s cleanup.

In an agreement reached in the early days of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government agreed to indemnify the nuclear contractors making plutonium at Hanford, including corporate giants General Electric and E.I. DuPont de Nemours.

That means U.S. taxpayers have also been paying the legal bills for the Hanford contractors’ defense in lawsuits by “downwinders” who say they were sickened by pollution from the facility – over $60 million so far – as well as any settlements to individual plaintiffs and favorable verdicts in the Hanford case.

Key Places

  • B Reactor

    The B Reactor was the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor and produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. This World War II-era file photograph taken by the federal government shows the B reactor during its early plutonium production days. It was shut down in 1968 and in 2008 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

More Information

Complete Coverage

News

Murray and Smiley debate: Hanford

Sen. Patty Murray and her opponent in the November election, Tiffany Smiley, respond to a question about the cleanup efforts at Hanford at a debate hosted by The Spokesman-Review, the League of Women Voters and KSPS at Gonzaga University on Oct. 23, 2022.
News >  Crime/Public Safety

Hanford contractor admits coronavirus aid fraud, will pay $2.9 million in restitution

HPM Corporation, which has held the occupational medicine services contract at the former nuclear weapons production plant in Benton County for a decade, applied for and received a $1.3 million loan from the federal government in April 2020 following passage of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. Federal investigators allege that money sat in a bank account for more than a year, rather than being used to pay employees, rent or mortgage expenses or utilities. 
News >  Washington

Hanford boosts contaminated groundwater cleanup to protect the Columbia River

The Hanford nuclear reservation is expanding its capacity to clean chemical and radioactive contamination from the groundwater. “That will reduce the time needed to clean up the groundwater,” said Mike Cline, the Department of Energy project director for cleanup of soil and groundwater at Hanford. “The more water we can treat, the quicker we can complete total cleanup.”
Older ›

Search