Hanford Site: Plutonium, Downwinders, and America's Costliest Cleanup

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

So picture this, it is March 1945, right in the middle of a desperate global war.

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Right, the absolute height of World War II.

SPEAKER_1 (0:09)

Exactly, and right in the middle of all that chaos, a US nuclear facility actually comes under enemy attack.

SPEAKER_2 (0:17)

But you know, not the way you would think.

SPEAKER_1 (0:19)

Right, it wasn't hit by a squadron of bombers or like a covert sabotage team, it was hit by a paper balloon.

SPEAKER_2 (0:26)

A Japanese paper balloon bomb specifically, just drifting silently across the Pacific Ocean all the way to Washington State.

SPEAKER_1 (0:32)

But it just floats in, hits a high tension power line between the Grand Cooley and Bonneville Dams, and boom, causes this massive electrical surge.

SPEAKER_2 (0:40)

Yeah, and that surge triggers an automatic shutdown, a scram of a top secret nuclear reactor.

SPEAKER_1 (0:46)

The bomb didn't even explode, but the disruption literally stopped a nuclear reaction in its tracks. And the craziest part of this whole thing...

SPEAKER_2 (0:53)

The workers didn't know.

SPEAKER_1 (0:55)

Exactly, the thousands of workers at that facility had no idea they were even building a nuclear weapon.

SPEAKER_2 (1:00)

It was actually the only US nuclear facility to come under enemy attack during the entire war.

SPEAKER_1 (1:05)

Which is wild. So welcome to our deep dive into the Hanford Site. I'm your host, and today we are looking at this 586 square mile patch of remote Washington Desert.

SPEAKER_2 (1:16)

It is such a fascinating transformation, really. I mean, going from quiet farmland and ancient indigenous fishing grounds to the birthplace of the plutonium used in the Nagasaki atomic bomb.

SPEAKER_1 (1:30)

And then it transforms again into the powerhouse of the Cold War nuclear arsenal. And finally, well, into the most expensive and complex environmental cleanup site in American history.

SPEAKER_2 (1:39)

Right. To really understand how a random paper balloon almost derailed the dawn of the atomic age, you have to understand why the military put a completely unproven apocalyptic technology in the middle of the desert in the first place.

SPEAKER_1 (1:53)

Because the Manhattan Project needed to build these industrial scale nuclear reactors. They had to manufacture a brand new element, plutonium, and they were in a desperate race to beat Nazi Germany to the bomb.

SPEAKER_2 (2:03)

But you can't just drop a nuclear reactor into any industrial part.

SPEAKER_1 (2:06)

No, definitely not.

SPEAKER_2 (2:07)

In 1942, the government had these incredibly stripped criteria for where this could happen. The site needed massive amounts of clean water. We are talking at least 25,000 gallons per minute. Plus a colossal electricity supply of roughly 100,000 kilowatts.

Crucially, it had to be a hazardous manufacturing area far from major population.

SPEAKER_1 (2:31)

Right. They had rules about that, didn't they? Yeah.

SPEAKER_2 (2:33)

They explicitly mandated that no towns of more than 1,000 people could be closer than 20 miles away. I mean, the original thought was to build this whole complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_1 (2:42)

Right. Alongside the other Manhattan Project facilities.

SPEAKER_2 (2:44)

Exactly.

But Knoxville was only 20 miles away. And given the experimental nature of what they were doing, I mean, a catastrophic accident there would mean unimaginable loss of life.

SPEAKER_1 (2:55)

So they go scouting. General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, and this engineer, Franklin Mathias.

In late December 1942, they find Hanford.

SPEAKER_2 (3:05)

And it checks all the boxes.

SPEAKER_1 (3:06)

Yeah. It has the adjacent Columbia River for an unlimited water supply. It has high voltage power lines running right through from those huge dams. It was just this perfect isolated grid.

SPEAKER_2 (3:18)

But, you know, the government didn't just move into an empty desert. They used the Second War Powers Act to essentially evict everyone overnight. We are talking about displacing thousands of local farmers from towns like Hanford, White Bluffs, and Richland.

SPEAKER_1 (3:33)

And even more significantly, they displaced indigenous tribes like the Wanapum, the Yakama, the Nez Perce, and the Umatilla.

SPEAKER_2 (3:40)

Tribes who had gathered and fished for salmon along that specific stretch of river for like 10,000 years.

SPEAKER_1 (3:47)

It's just staggering. I was looking through our sources, and I read that they actually allowed some of the local farmers to harvest their crops before leaving. But they used prison labor from McNeil Island Penitentiary to do it.

SPEAKER_2 (3:59)

Yeah, it is a completely surreal visual. Just inmates harvesting apples while the military prepares to build a nuclear site.

SPEAKER_1 (4:05)

So surreal. And then Groves brings in the chemical manufacturing giant DuPont to actually build and run this dangerous plutonium complex. And DuPont insists on a cost plus fixed fee contract, where their profit fee was exactly one dollar.