Doge Cuts Could Wreck The Cleanup Of Wartime Nuclear Waste At Hanford, Wa.

"Hanford made the plutonium for US atomic bombs, and its radioactive waste must be dealt with. Enter Elon Musk"

"In the bustling rural city of Richland, in south-eastern Washington, the signs of a nuclear past are all around.

A small museum explains its role in the Manhattan Project and its “singular mission – [to] develop the world’s first atomic bomb before the enemy might do the same”. The city’s high school sports team is still known as the Bombers, with a logo that consists of the letter R set with a mushroom cloud.

Richland lies just 30 miles from the Hanford nuclear site, a sprawling plant that produced the plutonium for America’s atomic weapons during the second world war – and later the bomb dropped over Nagasaki. Over the decades, thousands of people in the Tri-Cities area of southern Washington worked at the plant, which shuttered in 1989.

But a dark legacy of Hanford still lingers here: vast amounts of highly radioactive waste nobody is quite sure what to do with."

Andrew Buncombe reports for the Guardian May 15, 2025.

Source: Guardian, 05/20/2025