Draft Defense Budget Cuts Federal Aid for People and Places Exposed to Radiation by Nuclear Arsenal

Hawley–Lujan bid fails to restore Senate-adopted compensation to NDAA set for floor vote with ‘a scar on the conscience of this body and on this nation.’

The Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility is seen at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington, on June 30, 2005. The landfill is used to discard contaminated soil, building materials, and debris from cleanup work at the rate of 600,000 tons per year. Hanford was a plutonium production complex that played a key role in the nation's defense beginning in the 1940s with the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb and continued for 40 years. Jeff T. Green/Getty Images

Uranium ore was processed into weapons-grade plutonium on an industrial scale for the first time in a Mallinckrodt Chemical Co. plant north of downtown St. Louis, Missouri, in December 1942 as part of a secret project.

That first-generation plutonium, which existed on no manifest, was trucked to nearby warehouses along 19-mile Coldwater Creek, loaded onto coal trains bound for Canon City, Colorado, and eventually on to Alamogordo, New Mexico.