Hanford and the Atomic River

In the spring of nineteen forty-three, the United States government sent letters to the farm families living along a bend of the Columbia River in the high desert of south-central Washington. They had thirty days to leave. Their homes, their orchards, their graveyards would be taken. The government could not say why. The project had no name it would share.

What was built on those six hundred seventy square miles of sagebrush plateau, in less than two years, was the largest industrial enterprise in human history up to that point. The Hanford Engineer Works. Its mission was to produce plutonium.

The B Reactor at Hanford went critical in September of nineteen forty-four. It was the first full-scale plutonium production reactor ever built. By the spring of nineteen forty-five, kilogram-quantity shipments of plutonium were moving south by road convoy to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where scientists at the Manhattan Project's weapons laboratory were assembling what they called the gadget.

Hanford's plutonium went into the bomb tested at Trinity in July of nineteen forty-five. It went into the weapon dropped on Nagasaki on August ninth of that year. How one ought to weigh those facts is not a question this story will answer.

What the record does show is what came after. Decades of weapons production left Hanford with the largest concentration of radioactive waste in the Western Hemisphere, approximately fifty-six million gallons of high-level nuclear waste, sitting in underground tanks beneath the desert. Cleanup has been underway since nineteen eighty-nine. The expected cost runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The expected completion date keeps moving outward.

The Columbia still flows past Hanford. Salmon still use the river. The desert blooms in spring.