Nuclear Armageddon in Our Own Backyard

A new book by journalist Joshua Frank, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, tells the story of one of the world’s major nuclear waste sites–a place right here in the United States that most of you have likely never heard of. In Frank’s words, the Hanford Nuclear site, in Washington state, was “home to the US government’s gargantuan plutonium operation.” It “churned out nearly all of the radioactive fuel that was used in the country’s nuclear arsenal.” Although no longer active it remains, “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”