The Hanford Site is America’s most contaminated nuclear location. See photos of its long, toxic past.

During the Manhattan Project in the mid-1940s, Hanford was one of three main sites where thousands of workers developed and built the world’s first atomic bombs.

The government wanted both secrecy and security and chose an isolated location, away from cities on the East Coast. It’s about 150 miles southeast of Seattle.

The government wanted the site to be close to dams for electricity and near the river so it had a source of liquid to cool the reactors. The rural setting meant the operation would have to displace fewer people.

The government purchased the land in 1943 and gave about 2,000 locals, many of them farmers and Indigenous people, 30 days to leave, The New York Times reported.

One resident, Annette Heriford, later said the government paid far less than the land was worth, per the Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF).

They understood their work was related to the war effort, but the site’s role in building a nuclear weapon was top secret.

There were so many workers that Hanford and nearby Richland swelled with thousands of new residents. Most were white men, but Hanford also employed Black, Indigenous, and Latino workers, in addition to white women, according to the National Park Service.

Hundreds of new buildings went up to accommodate the growing population, including banks, grocery stores, and cafeterias.

Some of these places were integrated, while others were segregated. Restaurants in the area barred Black workers from entering, Cascade PBS reported.

The area stretched along the Columbia River, covering hundreds of acres.

It was the B Reactor that produced the first plutonium in the United States. The first supply of plutonium was delivered to the Army on February 2, 1945, just four months after the reactor began operating.

The physicians working at Hanford reportedly knew radiation could cause illness, and they used dosimetry devices to monitor workers’ exposure. They would wear badges containing photographic film that would develop an image of the protective case when exposed to radiation.

Fat Man, the nuclear bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945, also contained Hanford’s plutonium.

The bomb killed an estimated 50,000 people in Nagasaki, The BBC reported. Another 135,000 people died in Hiroshima, Japan, where the US dropped a uranium bomb a few days earlier.

On August 6, 1945, Spokane, Washington, residents awoke to the news that Hanford was one of the secret sites responsible for the atomic bombs.

“Tongues wagged, workmen talked, nearly every truck driver who passed that way had his pet theory,” The Spokane Daily Chronicle reported at the time. “Many may have guessed the correct answer. But still the riddle of Hanford remained — and the secret was kept.”

This time it was to supply the US with a nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Six more reactors were built by 1955. Production continued into the late 1980s.

The reactors weren’t all built at once but over a 20-year period from 1943 to 1963.

That’s a little less than the weight of 10 African elephants. Fat Man contained less than 14 pounds of plutonium, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

The site was responsible for a large part of the 60,000 nuclear weapons the US had made by 1987.

Some serious accidents and secret human experiments showed how deadly radiation sickness could be, according to the AHF. US officials suppressed information about how the bombs were causing severe illnesses and deaths in Japan, according to JSTOR.

In 1954, Life Magazine profiled Hanford employee Homer Moulthorp, who had created plastic suits to combat radiation sickness.

His friends referred to it as “Homer’s Hideous Hallucination.” Before that, the employees had to wear heavy clothing that had to be buried after being used once.

The researchers were trying to determine radiation’s effects on people. In 2007, 40,000 tons of dead animals and manure were uncovered from trenches in Hanford, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported. Most of the waste was manure, contaminated with radioactive strontium-90.

Even producing a small batch of plutonium would result in a huge amount of contaminated waste.

In a story for the Spokesman-Review, farmer Tom Bailie described the town of Ringold, Washington, about 11 miles southeast of the Hanford Site, as having unusually high rates of cancer.

The story’s reporter, Karen Dorn Steele, later found the government had conducted a test in 1949 to learn more about how the radioisotope Iodine 131 moved through the air, per NPS. Thousands of Hanford Downwinders, as they called themselves, filed lawsuits against the government. All the lawsuits have since been either dropped or settled.

The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Washington State Department of Ecology signed the agreement.

“It was at the end of the Cold War that the site’s mission shifted from production of plutonium and that material to environmental cleanup,” Ryan Miller, a communications manager for the Washington State Department of Ecology, told Business Insider.

By then Hanford was no longer making plutonium. Reactors started shutting down in the mid-1960s; the last one closed in 1987. It was exclusively a massive environmental hazard that needed to be cleaned up.

There are a host of challenges when it comes to cleaning up Hanford, from contaminated buildings and groundwater to leaky storage tanks holding radioactive waste.

Officials don’t even know where all the contaminated material is.

“One of the biggest challenges, at least back in the ’80s when cleanup started, was documentation,” Miller said. The agencies worked to figure out the scope of the problem, but they were hampered by poor record-keeping. “There’s a kind of shroud of secrecy over the Hanford Site, especially during World War II,” he added.

When Hanford first produced nuclear waste, workers buried contaminated clothes and tools in the desert, without recording the locations, The Daily Beast reported in 2013.

Across the reserve, there were nearly 1,700 waste sites.

During the production years, workers would dump barrels of waste and contaminated groundwater into unlined trenches, Miller said. The agencies have addressed over 1,350 sites so far, he added.

Liquid waste is usually contaminated water or sludge, which is described as having the same consistency as peanut butter.

The contaminated groundwater had a footprint larger than Boise, Idaho. Hanford set up pump-and-treat facilities to treat the water and then re-inject it back into the ground, Miller said. So far, the facilities have treated over 32 billion gallons of groundwater.

In 2017, the EPA said contaminated groundwater was flowing freely into the Columbia River. The river’s hundreds of thousands of gallons of water help dilute the uranium, tritium, and other substances that seep in, according to Washington’s Department of Ecology.

The first 149 tanks were built with a single layer of steel. In 1968, officials developed a new double-shelled model, storing waste in 28 of them.

Altogether, the tanks contain twice the radioactivity released by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Russia, The Atlantic reported. By 1989, 68 of the 149 tanks had leaked 900,000 contaminated gallons into the ground.

“This waste poses, arguably, the largest kind of cleanup effort being done at the Hanford site, and one of the biggest risks,” Miller said.

In 2010, Robert Alvarez, a former Energy Department official, said the amount of plutonium buried at Hanford could fuel 1,800 bombs, as reported by The New York Times.

It was only after a million gallons of waste had leaked into the ground that the DOE said more information was necessary, The New York Times reported in 2010. A year earlier, a contractor fired an employee who voiced concerns about the issue “too vigorously.”

“A lot of those tanks were built in the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s,” Miller said. “So all the tanks are well past their design life.”

In 2013, new leaks were discovered in several underground tanks. While management already knew that one tank was leaking at a rate of up to 300 gallons of waste every year, the discovery that five more were also leaking was especially concerning, CBS News reported.

The treatment plant will turn the waste from the deteriorating tanks into glass, which can then be stored more safely for several thousand years. This process, known as vitrification, is expected to begin with some of the low-activity, less radioactive waste next year.

Once the vitrified waste is stored in steel containers, workers will dispose of the low-activity glass at a Hanford landfill, which has been engineered with barriers, Miller said.

There’s currently no facility in the US capable of storing high-level waste long-term, so that too will stay at Hanford for the time being.

Strontium-90 is also called a “bone seeker” because it acts similarly to calcium — accumulating in bones — while increasing the risk of cancer.

Concerned about earthquakes, the DOE decided the capsules needed to be moved. In the next year or so, the agencies will start transferring them to dry storage, Miller said.

The nine reactors presented a challenge, Miller said, because they had big footprints. Workers removed hazardous materials and demolished supporting infrastructure and facilities.

In addition to the reactors, nearly 2,000 contaminated buildings covered the Hanford Site. The agencies have demolished almost half of them.

Crews demolished parts of the reactors, then encased the rest in giant steel structures. They will remain like this for at least 75 years, until radiation falls to a safe level and workers can dismantle the structures, though the method for full disposal isn’t yet known.

One reactor still needs to be cocooned — scheduled to be completed by 2032 — while another will remain standing.

The B Reactor was the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. Instead of being cocooned, it was turned into a National Historic Landmark in 2008. Some areas are still radioactive but visitors don’t have access to them, according to the tour’s safety sheet.

As many as 15,000 people visit the National Historical Park at Hanford each year. Most visitors to the site don’t need to wear dosimeters or other special equipment.

Instead of farmers and ranchers developing the land, it’s been left untouched for over 75 years, and wildlife has boomed. In 2000, President Bill Clinton made the 195,000-acre area a National Monument.

There are herds of elk and mule deer. Chinook salmon breed in stretches of the river in autumn, and it’s home to an abundance of birds, including burrowing owls, Swainson hawks, and sagebrush sparrows.

Not all animals are thriving, though. The agencies have found issues with radioactive wasp nests, fruit flies, and rabbits.

When radioactive rabbit droppings were found in the area, it was protocol to set traps to kill contaminated rabbits, The Seattle Times reported.

Recently, some populations, like the ground squirrels and burrowing owls, have been declining and specialists aren’t sure why.

As for radiation on and in the river, health officials said fish tested for radiation posed no health risk.

Earlier this year, Hanford workers pumped out contaminated water nearby that threatened to leak into the river, according to the Tri-City Herald.

In 2000, wildfires threatened the complex, and Washington’s Department of Health reported a rise in plutonium levels in the area, thought to be spread by dust and ash.

Some Hanford workers say they have lung-related illnesses, like COPD or cancer, that they attributed to the time at the site, OPB News reported in 2016.

When affected Russian thistle decayed and broke from its roots, the radioactive tumbleweeds could roll for up to 4 miles and spread a year’s dose of radiation, The Washington Post reported.

Hanford radiation experts said if it had been a windy day, radioactive particles could’ve blown around and made the situation much worse.

The DOE’s own experts had warned the tunnels might collapse for decades, KING 5 reported in 2017. The EPA said more tunnels would collapse as the equipment deteriorated.

In 2016, 61 employees were exposed to vapors from leaking tanks, two years after a report found a “causal link” between the vapors and lung and brain damage.

A 2021 Washington State Department of Commerce survey of over 1,000 current and former Hanford workers found that 57% had been exposed to hazardous materials.

The area is prone to wildfires and possible earthquakes.

The last big earthquake in the area was in 1936, but another sizable one could release radiation. That’s what happened with the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

Miller said Hanford is on track to start the vitrification process in the summer of 2025. Workers have already started making test glass.

But not all the waste will undergo vitrification. Instead, some will go through a different process, grouting, which makes the waste more like cement than glass. It’s less expensive and quicker, but the method hasn’t been as thoroughly tested as vitrification, Cascade PBS reported.

While the agencies say the deadlines haven’t changed, the agreement does update the Tri-Party Agreement.

Some stakeholders, like local tribes and environmental groups, said the agencies didn’t include them in the meetings about the new plans, OPB News reported.

New estimates are closer to 2069 or later. In 2002, the Government Accountability Office estimated the price to clean up Hanford at between $300 billion and $640 billion. The office put the timeline at a vague “decades.”

In March, President Joe Biden gave Hanford its highest cleanup budget yet, $3.05 billion. Things could change under the next administration.

During his first term, President Donald Trump proposed cutting Hanford’s budget and floated the idea of reclassifying high-level waste as less dangerous to lower costs, per The Los Angeles Times.

Miller said less funding could ultimately make cleaning up Hanford longer and more expensive.

“Every year that Hanford cleanup is underfunded, that can actually push the ultimate lifespan of the project out further,” he said. “It could actually balloon the cost by tens of billions of dollars if it’s not funded appropriately now.”

Tom Carpenter, executive director of the watchdog Hanford Challenge, told The Atlantic in 2018 that the majority of Hanford’s waste was going nowhere. “Hanford is going to be a national sacrifice zone for hundreds of years,” he said.

Sources used for this story include the Hanford Site, the Washington State Department of Ecology, the US Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Parks Service, the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the Government Accountability Office, and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

This story was originally published on September 23, 2019, and updated on December 17, 2024.