In A Small Town, Pride And Shame Over Atomic Legacy

Leah Sottile: RICHLAND, Wash. — The workers inside Hanford's nuclear reactors in the early 1940s knew their jobs were important, even if many of them didn't know why. They worked hard, and for that they were paid well, tucking their children into bed at night inside handsome homes with green lawns on streets named for brilliant engineers: Goethals Drive, Jadwin Avenue.

The secrecy around Hanford, a part of the Manhattan Project, came to light on Aug. 9, 1945, when U.S. forces dropped a thick-bellied, 10,000-pound plutonium-filled bomb called Fat Man on Nagasaki, Japan — vaporizing some 60-80,000 people in an instant and thereby ending World War II. All along at Hanford, they'd been…