Michael Mays
Michael Mays

In recent years, Hanford is perhaps best known as one of the nation’s most polluted nuclear sites. It is home to a vast, multibillion-dollar project to clean up 56 million gallons of toxic waste, much of it radioactive.

But next month, the Hanford site will acquire an unlikely new distinction: One piece of the nation’s newest national historical park.

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park will span three sites across the country: Oak Ridge, Tenn., Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford — all locations where scientists worked on different parts of the atomic-bomb project that helped end World War II and ushered in the nuclear age.

At Washington State University’s Tri-Cities campus — just a few miles from the southern entrance of the Hanford complex — four professors are team-teaching a freshman seminar on the history of the area. It’s part of a larger effort by the branch campus to partner with the Department of Energy to preserve Hanford’s history — stories, photos and artifacts which may contribute to the national historic site someday.

Teaching the area’s history — at the park and beyond — means exploring all the uncomfortable parts of its story, said visiting history professor Douglas O’Reagan. “[I]gnoring the really horrible parts of our past doesn’t make it go away.”

WSU has collected 75 oral histories from Hanford workers, and it is taking charge of about 3,000 artifacts from Hanford offices — dosimeters, workplace signs, tools specially made to produce the bomb. One day, those artifacts could become part of a museum.

Michael Mays, a WSU English professor and director of the Hanford History Project, has brought hundreds of students out to the historic sites and the reactor. Many of the students have lived in the Tri-Cities all their lives, and have relatives who worked on the Hanford project, but had never stepped foot on the site before.

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