(Credit: Anna King / NWPB) About a dozen federal workers have been fired from the Hanford site in southeast Washington state. Hanford is the contaminated legacy of plutonium manufacturing during […]Read More
A gate and signs stand guard at one of the Hanford site’s tank farms. (Credit: Anna King / NWPB) Listen (Runtime 4:02) Read By Anna King and Jeanie Lindsay Traffic […]Read More
Hanford workers take samples from tank SY-101 in southeast Washington state. (Courtesy: U.S. Department of Energy) Listen (Runtime :59) Read When it comes to tank waste at Hanford in southeast […]Read More
Rattlesnake Mountain on the Hanford site in 2022. The mountain is sacred to the Yakama Nation and other Northwest Indigenous tribes and bands near the Hanford site. (Credit: Anna King […]Read More
Freda, the Hanford Patrol dog, sits near the Horse Heaven Hills in the Tri-Cities. Several dogs that are kept as part of the Hanford Patrol are now kenneled away from […]Read More
Creator and host Alec Cowan’s shadow during a tour of the Sunday Mine Complex, a complex of five uranium mines in the Big Gypsum Valley near Paradox, Colorado, on Feb. […]Read More
A 2021 aerial photo of Hanford’s 200 Area, which houses the tanks and under-construction Waste Treatment Plant, in southeast Washington. (Credit: U.S. Department of Energy) Listen (Runtime 1:01) Read There […]Read More
A snapshot of the Hanford cleanup site showing the various groundwater plumes across the site. (Credit: U.S. Department of Energy / Office of Environmental Management) Listen (Runtime 1:00) Read A […]Read More
A group of elk runs from Yakama Nation hunters on the Hanford Reach National Monument in December 2023. (Credit: Star Diavolikis / Yakama Nation) Listen (Runtime 3:50) Read A video […]Read More
The 222-S Laboratory mainly studies the physical and chemical characteristics of radioactive waste to support retrieving waste from Hanford’s large underground tanks. Tuesday a vial of chemicals was found there […]Read More
The poured glass appears emerald green, just before it’s lidded and transported to an export bay at Hanford in southeast Washington. Hanford officials are celebrating this first container of glass […]Read More
The last in-person public meeting about Hanford cleanup was in Richland in 2019. (Courtesy of Washington State Department of Ecology) Listen (Runtime :56) Read The public can ask questions and […]Read More
David Turk, federal Deputy Secretary of Energy, speaks to about 100 people during an informational meeting about potential clean energy development at Hanford. (Credit: Anna King / Northwest News Network) […]Read More
The 324 Building on the Hanford Site (Courtesy: U.S. Department of Energy) Read A creepy old building used for 30 years to research radioactive materials from 1966 to 1996 has […]Read More
Several low-activity waste containers sit at Hanford, while one high-level waste canister lays in the foreground. [Photo courtesy of Washington Department of Ecology.] Read A massive melter intended to help […]Read More
Jordan Ashue, 18, says he was surprised by how long it will take to clean up portions of Hanford. Credit: Annie Warren / NWPB Listen (Runtime 4:00) Read On a […]Read More
A fire burned an estimated 1,000 acres on the Hanford nuclear reservation this weekend. The fire is now 100 percent contained, according to a Department of Energy spokesperson. (Courtesy: Benton […]Read More
Two deer are pictured near the D Reactor on the Hanford site. Leaders from across Washington and Oregon sent a letter to the Biden administration in early August to request […]Read More
Artist Glenna Cole Allee stands near “White Bluffs Tapestry,” a fabric-printed photo-collage that represents the White Bluffs of Hanford Reach. (Photo courtesy Glenna Cole Allee) Listen What started as a […]Read More
Crews have started heating up the first of two 300-ton melters inside Hanford’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. (Photo courtesy Bechtel National) Listen The world’s largest melter, designed to solidify […]Read More
The Hanford Site sits along the Columbia River near Richland, Wash., 35 miles from the Oregon border. Listen Federal and Washington state agencies finalized an agreement last week to address […]Read More
Workers walk at the end of the workday on the site of a facility being constructed to treat nuclear waste, Thursday, June 2, 2022, during a tour of the Hanford […]Read More
People take boat tours throught the Columbia River during the Hanford Journey, to celebrate cleanup advocacy. Credit: Bear Sky Media. Read As the Hanford cleanup budget has been reduced in […]Read More
Reports of an active shooter in a building at the Hanford Site caused an evacuation The “all-clear” has been given at the Hanford Site after reports of an active shooter […]Read More
Richland high school student Augustin Dulauroy directed a film about Hanford that debuts on Amazon Prime Listen Read A Richland high schooler has been hard at work on his side-gig […]Read More
Tom Carpenter, the man who headed the Hanford Challenge, and was a thorn in the side of many politicians, is retiring from the organization. Read More
Some people work their whole life trying to solve one big problem. That was the case with geoscientist John Zachara, who studied Hanford. Correspondent Anna King has this remembrance of the scientist who died recently from a rare form of blood cancer.Read More
At Hanford, a hazardous concoction of radioactive waste and chemicals sits in World War II and Cold War-era tanks. Now one of those old tanks has a serious leak. Read More
As President Donald Trump prepared to leave office, his Department of Energy was celebrating that a new analytical lab was “ready to operate” at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington.Read More
David Bowen has owned his own bar in Cle Elum, been a Kittitas County commissioner and managed groundwater nitrate cleanup in the Yakima Valley. Now, he’ll hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable for its cleanup at the site using the Tri-Party Agreement. That’s a 1989 document struck between Ecology, the federal Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Read More
By 1950, 20% of Pasco’s approximately 10,000 residents were Black, almost all living in slum conditions. Few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick -- a fact of which Kennewick city leaders and police at the time were proud. Not only was housing segregated, but Black residents were forced to endure broad discrimination in Read More
Under the settlement, Bechtel Corp. and Aecom will pay nearly $58 million over allegations from current or former Hanford employees. The workers said they were retaliated against for blowing the whistle over how labor hours were billed. Read More
It's been 75 years since the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks to Koko Kondo, who was an infant when one of those bombs was dropped on Hiroshima.Read More
Denin Koch's trip to the Hanford B Reactor when he was 19 stirred his musical passion. It eventually inspired a full jazz album exploring the complicated history of Hanford, 75 years after the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan ended WWII.Read More
Hackers working with the Chinese government targeted firms developing vaccines for the coronavirus and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets from companies across the world, the Justice Department said Tuesday as it announced criminal charges.Read More
The report from the independent Government Accountability Office says the U.S. Department of Energy has not found the root causes of the partial collapse of the waste-storage tunnel, and that failures in DOE’s investigation, inspections and maintenance of other aging and contaminated facilities is concerning.Read More
From 1949 to 1989, the massive plant’s job was to turn caustic liquids containing plutonium into solid plutonium “buttons,” as they were known. The finished buttons were about the size of hockey pucks and were used for America’s nuclear weapons. Read More
Washington Department of Ecology leaders say without access to this data, they can’t effectively protect the land, air and water for residents in eastern Washington and surrounding communities. They say they’ve attempted to negotiate this issue with federal Energy managers for years.Read More
At Hanford, in southeastern Washington, contractors have just completed much of the demo work at the site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant. But now crews have to finish the job. And that’s the tough part. Read More
As the country's 14th secretary of energy, Perry leads an agency he once vowed to eliminate. He has emerged as a central figure in the impeachment inquiry of Trump.Read More
The creators of a new musical work called “Nuclear Dreams” highlight the dreams and nightmares of people who work and live near Hanford in Washington’s Tri-Cities. Read More
An astonishing array of animals and habitats flourished on six obsolete weapons complexes — mostly for nuclear or chemical arms — because the sites banned the public and other intrusions for decades.Read More
A wildfire continued burning today near the Hanford Nuclear Site. The Cold Creek Fire is burning sensitive, federally protected habitat. As of Friday afternoon it was estimated at about 18,000 acres and 10 percent containment.Read More
A new federal report says that a massive building at the Hanford Nuclear Site is worse off than managers thought. The so-called PUREX -- Plutonium Uranium Extraction -- plant isn’t clean. Starting in 1956 the plant processed loads of plutonium. Its walls are up to 6 feet thick, and it’s as long as three football fields.Read More
The state of Washington is setting new deadlines for cleanup at Hanford and the plutonium production site that contains a massive quantity of radioactive waste.Read More
At the Hanford Nuclear Site in southeastern Washington, and across the West, winter’s deep snow and a cool spring have produced lots of brush and grass. That’s a problem for the coming fire season. Read More
A worker at the Hanford Nuclear Site was recently contaminated with a speck of radioactive material after work in a lab building scheduled for demolition. Read More
Federal watchdogs are looking into all types of parts at a $17 billion construction project at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Energy has found a sample of parts going into a large waste treatment plant at Hanford had problems.Read More
As nuclear and radioactive waste piles up, private companies are stepping in with their own solutions for the nation’s radioactive spent fuel. One is proposing a temporary storage site in New Mexico, and another is seeking a license for a site in Texas. But most experts agree that what’s needed is a permanent site, like Yucca Mountain, that doesn’t require humans to manage it.Read More
The project to stabilize and seal a large tunnel of radioactive waste has been completed at the Hanford nuclear reservation, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractor. The so-called Tunnel 2 project started in October 2018, at the massive Washington cleanup site near Richland.Read More
