By Annette Cary
RICHLAND, WA
The Tri-Cities will return to its one-of-a-kind past this summer and fall as it relives the events on the World War II home front.
Sept. 26 will mark 75 years since B Reactor, the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor, went critical at Hanford, helping end the war and ushering in the atomic age.
Some 50,000 men and women came to Eastern Washington during the war for a project so secret only a few knew what they were building.
In less than a year they built B Reactor — and more than 1,000 other buildings during the war years — to support the Manhattan Project to create the world’s first atomic bomb.
This summer the Tri-Cities will commemorate the 1944 start-up of B Reactor and its place in world history with exhibits, tours, concerts and festivals to pay tribute to those who toiled, often far from home, in the barren, dusty shrub steppe to help win the war.
The event returns for the 75th anniversary celebration Sept. 14.
A parade is planned, as was the Atomic Frontier Days tradition, and then people can gather at Howard Amon Park to experience what it was like for workers who came from across the country to Hanford during the war.
Booths will be set up where each “new worker” will have a security badge picture snapped, learn what job they will will hold and get assignments from their government housing to their mess hall. […]
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So many events–and not a word about Nagasaki, where the plutonium produced here was dropped to continuing effect.
Not to mention the illness and suffering inflicted locally.