The irony is that although the reactors contaminated hundreds of acres, government restrictions on access left the surrounding lands largely undisturbed for more than 40 years, allowing wildlife to flourish.
The effort to make the Hanford Reach a tourist hot spot got a boost in 2000, when President Clinton proclaimed 195,000 acres along the river and around the nuclear site a national monument. About 60,000 people now visit annually, including anglers, hikers, birders and history buffs.
That number is likely to grow under a plan by the National Park Service to upgrade boat launches and picnic sites and to open the B reactor for regular public tours. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is also expected this month to approve a recommendation by the park service to declare the B reactor a National Historic Landmark.
"I would like to see the B reactor preserved, because I would like that story to be told," said Kris Watkins, who heads the Tri-Cities Visitor & Convention Bureau, representing the nearby cities of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco. "I think it's a fascinating story."
The story began in 1942 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began searching for a plutonium production site for the then-secret Manhattan Project. With large tracts of land and access to large volumes of water to cool the reactor, the Hanford area along the Columbia River seemed perfect.
The only problem: About 1,200 people in the small agricultural towns of Hanford, White Bluffs and Richland called it home.
But everyone had to sacrifice for the war effort. That is what the U.S. Department of War said in 1943, when it condemned the land, evacuated the towns and leveled all but a few buildings to make way for the nuclear facilities. Some residents had just a few days' notice to leave. Only the town of Richland was rebuilt and reincorporated, in 1958.
America's first large-scale nuclear reactor was built in only 11 months. Most workers at the B reactor were clueless about what they were developing until the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Later, a headline in the local paper announced: "Peace! Our Bomb Clinched It!"
During the next 20 years, the federal government built eight more reactors along the Columbia River in a 586-square-mile area known as the Hanford site. The reactors became the area's largest employer, with more than 51,000 local jobs.
