The Environment

The Hanford site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex on the Columbia River in southeastern Washington state. It was established in 1943 to manufacture plutonium, which was used in the first nuclear bomb test at the Trinity site, and in ?EUR??,,????'?????<

Hanford Clean-Up Update

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, the weapons production reactors at Hanford, Wash. were decommissioned and environmental cleanup and restoration became the focus.

Many of the early safety procedures and waste disposal practices were inadequate.???????(R)?EUR??,,????'?EUR??,,?EUR A third of the original storage tanks leaked waste into the soil and groundwater. Government documents???????(R)?EUR??,,????'?EUR??,,?EUR confirm Hanford's operations released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River. Today, Hanford has a commercial nuclear power plant (Columbia Generating Station) and scientific R & D facilities (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the LIGO Hanford Observatory), but it?EUR??,,????'?????<