L&N visits the Hanford Site

Arguably the most polluted place on the planet, the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site was home to the bulk of the the United States’s plutonium production capacity during WWII and the Cold War. Today, decommissioned nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities line the Columbia River as an unprecedented cleanup effort strives to return an area half the size of Rhode Island to as near a pristine state as possible. We had the opportunity to document Hanford’s historic B Reactor, the first industrial-scale nuclear reactor and a primary plutonium source for some of the world’s first nuclear weapons.

Hanford B Reactor Control Room

Hanford B Reactor Face

Hanford B Reactor Control Room

Hanford B Reactor Control Room

Hanford B Reactor Control Room