As a tour bus cruises through one of Central Washington’s emptiest, most placid landscapes, it passes yellow Columbia Basin grasslands dotted by only a few buildings here and there. But when the vehicle pulls up to the B Reactor, its smokestack rising high above the blocky concrete buildings, history hangs heavy in the dry air. This is a tour about more than sights.
In the middle of World War II, the US Army Corps of Engineers selected this almost-empty desert for the classified Manhattan Project. Thousands of workers arrived on the Hanford site to complete a mysterious project, fully understood by only a few individuals. They constructed a reactor—on
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