Hanford - A Cold War Legacy in the Pacific Northwest
In the Pacific Northwest, the Second World War restructured the economy, society, and
the environment. Armaments production brought millions of dollars in defense contracts
to the region. Federal funds also transformed communities through the establishment of
military bases. Fort Lewis expanded to become, and remains today, a major military
installation. Camp Farragut, on north Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille, became the largest
inland naval base in the world, then closed in 1946. Small towns, like Moses Lake,
Washington, experienced the rapid growth that a military base brought.
But the most startling wartime transformation of communities and a landscape occurred
in southeast central Washington to the villages of Hanford and White Bluffs. In the
spring of 1943, about fifteen hundred people in this area received eviction notices
giving them thirty days to leave their homes. Without explanation to its inhabitants, the
federal government thus acquired a 560-square-mile area and called it the Hanford
Engineering Works (later the Hanford Nuclear Site). In a matter of months, workers
constructed 554 buildings, 386 miles of road, 158 miles of railroad, three massive
chemical plants, and the world’s first full-sized nuclear reactors. At the height of
wartime activity, nearly fifty thousand people bustled about the Hanford Site. Security
was so tight that no one knew what the complex produced until August 1945 when
atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hanford had produced the plutonium
for the atomic bomb test in July and for the Nagasaki bomb.
Below is a map of the Hanford Site. The 100 Area is home to the B nuclear reactor
where the Nagasaki plutonium was produced. More nuclear reactors were constructed
after World War II.
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Map is in the public domain as a work from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Scanned image
provided by User: Duk on Wikimedia Commons
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hanford_Reach_National_Monument.png).
During the Cold War, Hanford continued its central role in American nuclear technology
development and was joined by other facilities around the nation, including the National
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Reactor Testing Station (later the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental
Laboratory or INEEL) on the Snake River plain west of Idaho Falls. Throughout its
years of operation, Hanford plants generated vast amounts of airborne,
liquid, and solid wastes. From 1944 to 1947, the stacks of Hanford’s plutoniumseparation plants emitted 685,000 curies of radioiodine, which concentrates in thyroid
tissue. That amount was thousands of times more than the fifteen to twenty-four curies
released during the Three Mile Island incident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Although
airborne emissions declined after that, in 1949 Hanford deliberately released almost
eight thousand curies of radioiodine as part of an experiment known as the “Green
Run” (almost 8,000 curies of radioiodine was released at the same time (Gerber 91)).
In a display of arrogant disregard for the welfare of people in the region, government
nuclear scientists designed this experiment to test instrument detection of airborne
radioactive elements because the Soviet Union had just exploded its first atomic bomb
in that same year. Rain and snow soon deposited the Green Run releases throughout
the Columbia Basin. Plants, animals, and people all suffered the effects of being
downwind.
Besides these airborne emissions, Hanford discharged water used for cooling reactors
into the Columbia River. Other solid and liquid waste was stored in tanks, cribs, ditches,
and ponds. Some radioactive waste was poured directly on the ground. Not until the
Cold War began to thaw in the 1980s did the Department of Energy release thousands
of pages documenting these discharges. One of the many ironies of Hanford is the
records kept of radioactive emissions. Such detailed accounts exist only because
Hanford led the nation in environmental monitoring and health physics.
Today Pacific Northwesterners suffer the legacy of the Cold War. Radioactive
wastes at Hanford and INEEL continue to threaten the Columbia and Snake rivers and
associated aquifers. The cleanup efforts will take decades and billion of dollars to
complete. Meanwhile Hanford “downwinders” sue the government for the health
problems that they claim Hanford’s radioactive releases caused. Created in 1943 as a
temporary wartime installation, Hanford promises a human legacy of at least a
generation and an environmental one of a millennium.
Web Sites
The Department of Energy maintains a Web page on the Hanford Site that includes
historical information and photographs.
From 1944 to 1972, the Hanford Reservation released radiation into the air, ground,
and the Columbia River. As many as two million people in eastern Washington,
northeastern Oregon, Idaho, and into Montana and Canada may have been exposed.
The Hanford Health Information Archive (HHIA) at Gonzaga University in Spokane is a
collection of information about the health experiences of “downwinders,” people who
were or may have been exposed to Hanford radiation releases. You can access the
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HHIA home page or the Gonzaga Library site on the Hanford Health and Information
Archive.
Works Cited:
Gerber, Michele Stenehjem. On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford
Nuclear Site. 2nd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
©2010, rev. 2011 Susan Vetter
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