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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 a scale that had never been built before—to create an element that had never existed before. Locals learned the truth August 1945 when the United States dropped Little Boy and Fat Man, the world’s first nuclear bombs used in war, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The plutonium for Fat Man, which killed as many as 75,000 people, was made in the B Reactor.
More than 80 years later the land remains a gated government facility, and the only way for most people to see it is through tours operated by the US Department of Energy and National Park Service. Outings departing from the Tri-Cities pass the various elements that were added to the Hanford Site after the B Reactor: now-shuttered power-generating nuclear reactors, nuclear waste storage, complex cleanup projects, and a scientific observatory that uses gravitational wave vibrations to decipher outer space. A special pre–World War II tour also covers Indigenous settlements and the prewar towns uprooted by the work.
Though the guided tours are the best way to see this strange historic sector of the state, one side of the reservation is bordered by a long free-flowing section of the Columbia River known as the Hanford Reach. Kayak trips take in the White Bluffs and distant reactor buildings, plus all the birds and mule deer who don’t know they’re crossing into off-limits government land.
