The Hidden Story of America's Most Contaminated Place: Hanford

In 1943, the U.S. government emptied a stretch of desert along the Columbia River of its residents, turned it into the plutonium engine of the Cold War, and left behind 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in leaking underground tanks. This is the story of Hanford, Washington — not the physics of plutonium production, but the place, the people displaced to build it, the communities contaminated by its operations, and the four decades of institutional concealment that kept 19,000 pages of evidence classified. The Atomic Energy Commission knew the Columbia River was contaminated from the first day the reactors operated. It authorized a deliberate radiation release over a civilian population in December 1949. It monitored the health of surrounding communities without informing them what they had been exposed to. And it assured the public that not one atom had escaped. The cleanup is now the most expensive environmental remediation in world history — projected to cost between $364 billion and $589 billion and continue past 2086. This documentary covers the displacement of the farming communities of Hanford and White Bluffs, the abrogation of Wanapum and Yakama treaty rights, the construction of B Reactor and the wartime plutonium production mission, the contamination of the Columbia River, the Green Run experiment of 1949, the 177 underground waste tanks, the 1986 declassification, the downwinder lawsuits, and the ongoing cleanup. --- SOURCES AND FURTHER READING 2025 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report (U.S. Department of Energy) Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project (HEDR), Technical Steering Panel Reports Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, Staff Memo on the Green Run (1994) Kate Brown, "Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters" (Oxford University Press, 2013) Karen Dorn Steele, reporting for the Spokesman-Review (1986–2000) Russell Jim, "We Would Like to Have Answers" (2003), in Daniel M. Cobb, ed., "Say We Are Nations" (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, fish consumption surveys Trisha Pritikin, "The Hanford Plaintiffs: Voices from the Fight for Atomic Justice" (University Press of Kansas, 2020) National Park Service, Manhattan Project National Historical Park, Hanford Unit documentation U.S. Government Accountability Office, reports on Waste Treatment Plant cost and schedule (2013–2024) HistoryLink.org essays on Hanford site history, David Sohappy, and Franklin Matthias --- Subscribe for the next investigation.