And now for a quick lesson in government spending: in the 1940s
the federal government created the now mostly decommissioned
Washington's Hanford Nuclear Reservation as part of the
Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. During the Cold War,
the project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and
five large plutonium processing complexes, which produced
plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear
arsenal. Sadly, many of the early safety procedures and waste
disposal practices were inadequate, and government documents
have since confirmed that Hanford's operations released
significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and
the Columbia River. The weapons production reactors were
decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the decades of
manufacturing left behind 53 million US gallons of high-level
radioactive waste, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid
radioactive waste, 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater
beneath the site and occasional discoveries of