Doge Cuts Could Wreck The Cleanup Of Wartime Nuclear Waste At Hanford, Wa. [1]
"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."