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8/28/2008--Richland, WA, USA..The Richland High School football team at practise. In the fall of 1945, after an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, students changed the team's mascot to a mushroom cloud and called themselves the 'Bombers'. The plutonium that was in that bomb was manufactured by workers at nearby Hanford Nuclear Site as part of the Manhattan Project. ..During the Cold War, the Hanford project was expanded to include nine nuclear reactors and five massive plutonium processing complexes, which produced plutonium for most of the 60,000 weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The weapons production reactors were decommissioned at the end of the Cold War, but the manufacturing process left behind 53 million U.S. gallons of high-level radioactive waste that remains at the site. Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup, providing thousands of jobs to residents in nearby towns such as Richland...©2008 Stuart Isett. All rights reserved.

Copyright: ©2010 Stuart Isett. All rights reserved.