Hanford Nuclear Power Plant

No one ever thought they'd see it happen. Not in this town, home of the Atomic Foods supermarket, the Bombers football team (with the tiny mushroom cloud over the school sign) and streets with names like Proton Court. But then no one in this company town ever thought the company would admit it had hurt them. The company, in this case, is the U.S. Department of Energy, operator of the Hanford plutonium-making complex in central Washington.

A 10-year study of 3,400 people has found no link between Cold War-era radiation releases from the Hanford nuclear site at Richland, Wash., and the rate of thyroid disease among people living downwind. The announcement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upset many in the Northwest who for years have blamed Hanford for a variety of diseases, particularly cancer.

The U.S. Department of Energy has fined a Fluor Corp. subsidiary $140,625 for repeated safety violations by two of its subcontractors last year during cleanup of a former nuclear weapons plant in Hanford, Wash. It is the largest levy against a civilian contractor since the department began enforcing nuclear facility safety rules in 1996, but it wasn't enough for critics, who called it a slap on the wrist. The fine was disclosed in a March 26 letter to Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc.

There is probably no more-contaminated place on Earth than this wind-whipped nuclear desert in central Washington, which for 45 years was the plutonium kitchen that fueled much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. By the time it shut down production in 1989 and embarked on what would become the nation's biggest environmental cleanup, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation had accumulated 450 billion gallons of liquid wastes and 200 square miles of contaminated ground water.

A chemical explosion at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation that released plutonium and other hazardous chemicals was followed by a near-complete breakdown in emergency response, exposing workers to a toxic plume and leaving outside authorities unaware of the danger until hours after the event, a government report concluded Friday. In a series of extraordinary admissions, the Department of Energy and Fluor Daniel Hanford Inc.

Nine years after the last reactor shut down at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, there are 14 million gallons of deadly wastes buried in Hanford's sandy belly. Chromium and strontium are leaking into the Columbia River. Particles of radioactive Iodine-131 (eight times the amount released in the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island) blew up Hanford's smokestacks, settling like an invisible rain on the wheat-colored grass and shrubs of southeastern Washington. How deadly was the result?

On a dark winter day, five elders eat a quiet lunch in the tribal Chapter House in Red Valley, Ariz., a dry corner of the Navajo reservation where most everything is dusted with the windblown earth. The meal is traditional mutton stew. The conversation, shared in the soft sound of Navajo, is filled with grief.

When contractors at the giant Hanford atomic weapons site in Washington state were hit with class-action suits by workers and neighbors, they hired some of the best legal talent available, running up attorneys' fees of $10.8 million last year alone. Facing huge damage claims for toxic and radioactive pollution, the companies are responding without having to worry about the legal cost. The reason?

More than 120 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste was intentionally discharged into the ground at the Hanford nuclear reservation from 1946 to 1966, a new federal study says. The Energy Department report, released Friday, combines for the first time known data on radioactive releases from the huge reservation where plutonium was once produced for nuclear weapons.