June 27, 2006
Hanford Site Tour
...the Hanford Site, a 586-square-mile reservation created in World War II as part of the Manhattan Project.
The desire to see what is inside the fences of the reservation drew 350 people here over three days to view the mix of past, present and future at the once-secret site.
...the DOE reactors and other facilities on the reservation were dedicated to creating one final product, plugs of plutonium which were later machined into the explosive hearts of nuclear weapons.
"We made about 27,000 of those," (Michele Gerber, one of the tour guides) said. "That was about 60 percent of the nuclear material made in the United States".
That's why Hanford's famous and that's why it will be famous for probably as long as we're alive," Gerber said.
The tour's final leg led through the "200 Areas," where the plutonium was chemically separated from uranium slugs and then made a stop at one of the largest landfills in the United States, where low-level radioactive waste is being buried in lined pits.
As with everything else at the Hanford Site, the quantities are huge. According to Tom Kisenwether, one of the site workers, more than six million tons of waste have been buried at the site, with more to come.
"We do about 3,000 tons a day," he said.
story | Walla Walla Union-Bulletin
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