‘Pristine but deadly’: Visiting the most contaminated place in America

Artist Michael Brophy toured the Hanford Site in Eastern Washington in 2017 and spent years afterward producing nine paintings of the sprawling former plutonium production complex, which supplied material for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The site, now both a national monument and the nation's largest environmental cleanup project, shut down production in 1971 and has been under remediation since the 1980s.

Experts quoted in the piece disagree on whether the pace of cleanup, now exceeding 40 years, reflects government failure or simply the genuine difficulty of the task; more people are currently employed cleaning up Hanford than worked there producing plutonium at the height of the Cold War. The surrounding land, displaced from the Wanapum tribe by the Army in 1943 with three weeks' notice, has in the meantime reverted to something close to wilderness, visited today mostly by guided tours and the occasional canoeist on the Columbia River.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.