The thousands of engineers, civil servants, and laborers at the facility created the plutonium for the bomb that the U.S. The first Hanford reactor began operating in 1944. Two buildings in Pasco - a long bus ride from the work site - housed the fewer than 50 Mexican American construction workers. Separate barracks were built for the more than 5,000 Black construction workers. ![]() Nonwhite workers - who were given mostly temporary and menial jobs as construction or food workers - were not allowed to live in Richland. Richland and Hanford were racially segregated, and white workers were paid more than workers of color for the same jobs. Construction took 18 months, and the rapid assembly-line and prefabrication techniques Pehrson used to build Richland would be adopted later in the creation of other suburban U.S. Gustav Albin Pehrson, a Swedish-born architect from Spokane, was selected to transform Richland into a suburban-style community complete with schools, churches, a hotel, and a hospital for the 16,000 Hanford employees and their families. In addition to Hanford, the government acquired the farming town of Richland, about 15 miles from the nuclear site. The condemned area also included sacred fishing grounds of the Wanapum, a Native tribe whose name translates to "river people" and who traveled large stretches of the Columbia to catch salmon for trade and sustenance. They were told that they would be compensated for the values of their homes and businesses. The town of Hanford's residents, mostly farmers, were given 30 days to evacuate. Government officials evicted about 1,500 people from their homes, and disinterred 177 bodies from the White Bluffs cemetery and moved them to Prosser. Hanford's construction closed off hundreds of square miles of land and river. The Manhattan Project was highly classified, and the site's remote location was chosen for safety and secrecy - and its proximity to rushing water from the Columbia River, needed to cool the reactors and produce hydroelectric energy to power them. Named after the farming town of Hanford in Benton County, the building of the site displaced the town's residents when construction began in March 1943. ![]() government's Manhattan Project, a secret atomic weapons race against Germany during World War II. Its purpose was to extract plutonium from spent uranium to develop nuclear bombs. The top-secret Hanford Engineer Works was built by DuPont under contract with the U.S. Hanford's B Reactor, preserved and designated a National Historic Landmark, began hosting public tours in 2009. The park also includes decommissioned nuclear sites in New Mexico and Tennessee. In 2015, Hanford's nearly 600-square-mile expanse along the Columbia River near Richland became part of the Manhattan Project National Historic Park. Since then, it has mostly treated the waste it generated. Worker-safety issues, mismanagement, and public-health dangers were subsequently revealed, and Hanford was decommissioned in 1989. But Hanford's nuclear reactors, eight by 1955, also produced massive amounts of radioactive waste, much of which was released into the environment. ![]() Weapons production continued at Hanford during the Cold War, and in 1964 the facility began generating electricity for the Pacific Northwest. Originally known as Hanford Engineer Works, the Hanford Nuclear Site was built in the early 1940s to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and effectively ended World War II.
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