nuclear-news

Hanford, near Richland, about 200 miles east of Seattle in south-central Washington state, is the newest national park.

Visitors will not, however, be allowed anywhere near the country’s largest collection of toxic radioactive waste.

“Everything is clean and perfectly safe,” said Colleen French, the US Department of Energy’s program manager for Hanford. “Any radioactive materials are miles away.”

The Manhattan Project national historical park, signed into existence in November, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the US effort to build an atomic bomb during the second world war.

At Hanford, the main attractions will be B Reactor and the ghost towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were evacuated by the government to make room for the Manhattan Project………

Nine reactors were built at Hanford and operated during the Cold War. That work created more than 56m gallons of radioactive waste that the government still spends more than $1bn a year to maintain and clean up…….. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/20/hanford-nuclear-reservation-manhattan-project-washington-national-park