Bush OKs Park Study for Historic Atomic Sites

President Bush has signed a bill requiring the federal government to study the potential for adding historic Manhattan Project sites, including a reactor at the Hanford nuclear site, to the national park system.

Former nuclear workers and concerned residents for years have been trying to preserve Hanford’s B Reactor as a museum.

The south-central Washington reactor produced the plutonium for the first nuclear blast, the Trinity test in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, and for the bomb that was dropped that August on Nagasaki, Japan.

Other sites mentioned in the bill include Los Alamos, N.M., and Oak Ridge, Tenn.