The U.S. government set up Hanford in 1943 to create plutonium for the nation’s atomic bombs, including those exploded in New Mexico and over Nagasaki in 1945. That development work created many billions of gallons of chemical and radioactive wastes, the worst 56 million gallons of which were pumped into 177 underground tanks. About a third of those tanks leak. At least a million gallons of radioactive liquid has leaked into the ground, seeping into the aquifer 200 feet below and into the Columbia River, roughly seven miles away.
In 1989, the Washington Department of Ecology, DOE and the EPA signed the Tri-Party Agreement to govern Hanford’s cleanup with the
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