The Apocalypse Factory by Steve Olson

The Hanford nuclear reservation in south-central Washington State is best known today as the most radiologically contaminated place in the western hemisphere and as the site of an immense government-funded cleanup.

But in his new book The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age, Seattle author Steve Olson argues that Hanford is also the most important site in the history of the nuclear era. The world’s first large-scale nuclear reactor was built at Hanford, and all subsequent nuclear reactors are based on technologies developed there.

Hanford produced the plutonium used in the world’s first nuclear explosion at the Trinity test in New Mexico, in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and in the weapons in the current U.S. nuclear arsenal, all of which are built around a fist-sized pit of Hanford-made plutonium.

Olson, who grew up just 20 miles from Hanford, will explain the significance of what…