Not saying you don’t know this already, but just throwing in additional context/info:

Hanford… isn’t/wasn’t… the kind of nuclear power plant that is primarily geared toward the generation of energy. It actually required a significant amount of energy, they had to build a new substation for it, drawing off of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams.

It was built as part of the Manhattan project.

To refine or transform Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239.

Hanford produced the plutonium used in the Trinity test bomb, and in the Fat Man bomb that destroyed Nagasaki.

It kept producing weapons grade nuclear material through till about the mid 60s, then mostly ceased that kind of operation and functioned as varying kinds of test nuclear reactors and also was used for other scientific studies.

More recently, one of the LIGO, gravity wave detectors, was built and operated there.

… But, it also serves as a nuclear waste storage site… and has had a whole lot of problems of leaking said nuclear waste into the ground water table over the last several decades, a good amount of which was making its way into the Columbia river, at one point.

As of 2023, apparently 10k people are/were employed in cleanup efforts… it is a Superfund site, a special program Congress came up with a while back to address egregious toxic waste sites across the country.

… And the entire site was built on land sacred to multiple Native America tribes, many of whom were relocated… It is located basically on / near where the Snake, Yakima and Columbia rivers meet, and has… had been continuously inhabited by native peoples for thousands of years, and functioned as a place of meeting between the Nez Perce, Umatilla and Yakama peoples.

So… yeah. Took a sacred historical site and quite literally turned it into a nuclear waste dump.