August 8, 2014

August 8, 2014

Our first stop this morning was just a few miles away at the Hanford Reach Visitor Center in Richland, WA. The first half of the museum was about the geology of the region, which we had heard several times. It then went into the Manhattan Project. Hanford played a crucial role as the production plant for plutonium. Hanford was selected as the site, because it was sparsely populated, near a major river for cooling (Columbia) and had lots of excess power (newly constructed Grand Coulee dam). The plutonium was used in the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Richland was the new city where the scientists were housed.

While the reactor has not operated in many years, there is even more people working there on decontamination fifty years after it shutdown. Unfortunately the employees have an incentive to drag out the cleanup, so it is likely to continue ad infinitum. The Hanford Reach land that surrounds the facility was declared a National Monument as a security and contamination buffer.

Continuing east we stop briefly at the Frenchtown Historic Site before continuing on to nearby Whitman Mission National Historic Site.  Aimee and I learn about the interesting human-interest story in the Visitor Center before walking the former mission grounds.  The Whitmans, caught up in the Protestant Revival movement in upstate New York, were inspired to become missionaries.  After an arranged marriage they traveled west to this site in 1836 to proselytize the Cayuse Indians.  It was a difficult, grueling, and ultimately unsuccessful endeavor.  Their only daughter drowned at age two.  They adopted seven children orphaned along the Oregon Trail.  During their eleven-year tenure, the Cayuse were decimated by disease.  The Whitmans ended up being blamed and were tomahawked in 1847.