May 1, 2003

Hanford Test Site

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Hanford Test Site

Location: Hanford, Washington

The Official Story: Covering 586 square miles, the Hanford site produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1944 to 1990. Three formal alerts have occurred in the last 13 years involving chemical explosions.

The Terrible Truth: During the December 1949 Green Run test, a massive cloud of radioactive iodine was released into the atmosphere simply to test recently installed radiological monitoring equipment. Passing over Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon border, the cloud irradiated thousands of unsuspecting people. The current estimate to clean up the site’s waste is 52 billion dollars.

Fun With Atoms: The nearby Richland High School ‘Bombers’ have a mushroom cloud logo on their football helmets.

Quote: “Environmentally, [the Hanford site] is really interesting because there’s all these plants and animals that don’t exist anywhere else.” – Teri Hain, author of Atomic Farmgirl: Growing up right in the wrong place

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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