The cleanup project has become the second-largest employer in the region, behind agriculture, generating about 11,000 jobs. But locals hope that when the cleanup is done, tourism will take over as the region's new economic engine.
The jet boat roared to life at the wooden dock at Howard Amon Park in Richland and rocketed up the Columbia River toward the Hanford Reach National Monument. Seated inside, 15 tourists craned their necks over the side, the brisk morning air blowing in their faces.
The high-speed, 60-mile tour of the river extends to the heart of the monument, where radiation warning signs and shuttered nuclear reactors dot the flat landscape.
Clarence Reynolds, a contractor for the city of Walla Walla, took the boat tour on a recent Saturday morning with a group of friends to celebrate his 73rd birthday. Along the way, he spotted deer grazing along the shores, a coyote sauntering in the shadows of 300-foot bluffs, white pelicans feeding along a beach and several blue herons and white egrets soaring over the river.
Near a popular fishing spot called Ringold, the boat passed an angler who had hooked a 4-foot sturgeon, a prehistoric-looking fish that can grow up to 15 feet long in these waters.
A few minutes later, the boat's captain stopped the engines near the shore so the tourists could get a closer look at two osprey chicks squawking in a twig nest perched on an old telephone pole.
Reynolds took the tour to see the wildlife, the scenery and the historic reactors. And it didn't disappoint. "It was great," he said afterward. "Awesome."
Even more popular than the boat trips are the occasional tours of the historic B reactor offered by the Department of Energy. Visitors can see the original controls, dials and nuclear core that produced the world's first weapons-grade plutonium.
But getting a spot on the tour is mostly a matter of luck and mouse-clicking speed. When the federal agency opens online registration, the tour fills up in five or six minutes. Visitors, according to the Energy Department, are mostly history buffs and World War II veterans who want to see the reactor that helped end the war.
Even though the agency has increased the number of tours from 18 last year to 48 this year to meet the demand, all those for the rest of 2008 have been filled. If the National Park Service takes over the tours, they would be expanded significantly.
