In 1943 the US government established a nuclear research site in south-central Washington State at the town of Hanford on the Columbia River. That area had been used by Native American tribes for thousands of years and was the location for a reservation. The Yakima Indians were moved to another reservation west of the old reservation in 1943 to make way for the construction of the Hanford nuclear site. They still retain the right to monitor the health of the natural environment at the Hanford nuclear site.
The Hanford site currently covers about six hundred square miles of desert with the Columbia River forming the north and east boundaries of the site. The area gets less than ten inches of rainfall annually. The site was considered idea because of its isolation and abundant water supply. Some of the people living nearby were moved to other locations. There are three separate areas for reactors, chemical separation facilities and waste storage. Some of the land that was originally part of the Hanford site has been returned to civilian use.
The first plutonium production reactor in the world was built at the Hanford site as part of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons during World War II. Plutonium was produced there for the first test nuclear bomb and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
During the period known as the Cold War following World War II, the site was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five plutonium processing installations. The plutonium installations produced plutonium for almost sixty thousand bombs in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Scientists at Hanford developed many techniques and technologies used in the evolving nuclear industry. The site has been mostly decommissioned but still hosts the Columbia Generating Station's nuclear reactor which generates power for the grid as well as research facilities including the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Most of the reactors were shut down by 1971 with the last reactor shut down in 1987. They were entombed in concrete. Unfortunately, radioactive isotopes were released into the air and into ground water that reached the Columbia River because the early safety and waste disposal techniques were still evolving and were not adequate. The health of the environment and people living in the area were impacted by the radioactive releases.
Weapons production at Hanford ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. Over fifty million gallons of high level liquid nuclear waste was left by the years of weapons production, most of it stored in metal tanks. Twenty five million cubic feet of solid nuclear waste was buried which contaminated over two hundred square miles of groundwater beneath the site.
Hanford is the site of the biggest environmental cleanup project in the United States. Two thirds of the high-level nuclear waste in the United States is located at Hanford.
