In the winter of 1943, farmers in the small towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, in the dry scrubland of eastern Washington along the Columbia River, received letters from the federal government informing them that their land had been seized. They had thirty days to leave. No explanation was given. The farms had been in some families for generations. They were paid, but they were not given a choice, and they were not told why.
Within months, the government built a city. Not a camp. A city. Fifty one thousand people moved in. There were dormitories, cafeterias, a hospital, a movie theater, a baseball diamond, churches, and a bus system. The city was called Richland, though the workers called the surrounding area the Hanford Engineer Works. It was, for a time, the fourth largest city in Washington.
Almost nobody who lived there knew what they were building.
The Hanford site was part of the Manhattan Project, the secret government program to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could. The facility's job was to produce plutonium, one of the two fissile materials needed for a nuclear weapon. Enormous reactors along the Columbia River irradiated uranium fuel rods, which were then processed in massive chemical separation plants to extract the plutonium. The process required staggering amounts of water, which is why the Columbia River was chosen, and staggering amounts of electricity, which is why Grand Coulee Dam was nearby.
The secrecy was total. Workers were told only what they needed to know to perform their specific task. A pipe fitter knew how to fit pipes but not what flowed through them. A chemist knew the formulas but not the purpose. The entire operation was compartmentalized so completely that a person could work at Hanford for years without understanding the nature of the product they were making. Security posters reminded employees: "Don't ask what. Don't ask why. Don't ask where. Just do your job."
The scale was difficult to grasp even for the people inside it. The B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor, was a concrete block the size of a building, its face studded with two thousand aluminum tubes into which uranium slugs were loaded by hand. Cooling water from the Columbia River flowed through the reactor at a rate of thirty thousand gallons per minute. The workers who loaded the uranium understood that whatever they were doing involved a lot of very expensive material and an extraordinary amount of effort. They just did not know what it added up to.
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Nagasaki bomb used plutonium produced at Hanford. When President Truman announced the bombings and revealed the existence of the bomb, the workers at Hanford finally learned what they had been building.
The reactions were complicated. Many felt pride. They had helped end the war. Japan surrendered within days. The men who would have died in an invasion of the Japanese mainland, hundreds of thousands by some estimates, would now come home. Many felt horror. They had helped create a weapon that killed over a hundred thousand people, most of them civilians, in two blinding flashes. Some felt both at the same time and spent the rest of their lives trying to reconcile the two.
The Hanford site continued producing plutonium for the nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War, eventually operating nine reactors along the river. The work was considered vital to national security, and for decades, nobody asked too many questions about what was happening to the waste. They should have.
The environmental cost was enormous. Radioactive waste was dumped into unlined trenches in the ground. Contaminated water was poured into the soil. Radioactive materials leaked into the groundwater and seeped toward the Columbia River. For years, the government deliberately released radioactive iodine into the atmosphere in experiments that exposed nearby communities without their knowledge or consent. Hanford became the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States. Some estimates call it the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.
The cleanup, which began in earnest in the 1990s, is expected to take decades and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It is, by some estimates, the most expensive environmental remediation project in human history. The work is not close to finished. Some of the waste tanks, which hold millions of gallons of radioactive sludge, are leaking. The technology to safely process some of the materials has not yet been invented.
The farms that were seized in 1943 are still gone. The towns of Hanford and White Bluffs no longer exist. The desert has reclaimed most of the land, though the reactors and processing plants are still there, some of them still too radioactive to dismantle. The B Reactor, the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor, is now a National Historic Landmark. You can tour it. Standing inside it, looking up at the face of the reactor with its two thousand fuel channels, it is difficult to know what to feel. Pride, maybe. Horror, maybe. Both at once, which is perhaps the most honest response to a place that changed the world and poisoned the ground it stood on.