Description

Laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, Hanford is designated the most toxic place in America by the EPA. It is also the most expensive environmental cleanup job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too realan event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl. And aside from a few whistleblowers, several feisty community groups, and a handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records.

In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers, and the global environment.

JOSHUA FRANK is an award-winning California-based journalist and coeditor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is a coauthor of several books, most recently The Big Heat: Earth on the Brink.

978-1-64259-828-5 • 200 pages