Results tagged “hanford”

CLEANUP IN REACTOR B: Oh Hanford. In the '40s, Southeast Washington's Columbia Basin was a burgeoning industrial center, thanks to plutonium production as part of the Manhattan Project. Spoiler alert: There are future repercussions. As the winner of Best Film at last year's Local Sightings Film Festival, Grant Aaker and Josh Wallaert's documentary Arid Lands explores the many facets of the nuclear cleanup and the myriad players--Native Americans, farmers, developers, activists, fishermen, and scientists--in the community. The film plays at the NWFF through Thursday.

• Put your jazz hands together for Seattle's Garfield High School jazz band who won first place at Lincoln Center's 14th annual Essentially Ellington competition in NYC this weekend, beating out crosstown rival jazz band and reigning champion Roosevelt High School.
• Perverted vegetables found in Seattle.
• Seattle Beer Week is well underway and to celebrate tonight's festivities, check out the Dry T-shirt Contest in West Seattle. Say wha? Dry T-shirt? Ohhh, they want you to wear the best beer-related shirt (oldest, farthest away, etc.).The only thing wet you'll find is the pints of beer.

MSNBC has just updated its Adversity Index, which uses data on employment, business growth, and housing prices to label each state and metro area as expanding, at risk of recession, in recession, or recovering. The most recent data (through February 2009) in their economic downturn-ometer indicates that the recession reached 367 of the nation's 381 metro areas and 47 out of 50 states. But good news: Olympia--while still in a recession since January--hasn't been hit too hard due to being a state capital chockful of government employees. And then there's this: "the Kennewick-Pasco-Richland metro area has only now joined the recession, thanks to a resource that will pay glowing dividends for thousands of years: nuclear waste from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War." Um, three cheers for Hanford?

A cool historical artifact has recently been discovered in Washington, but don't expect to see it in a museum anytime soon. The world's oldest weapons-grade plutonium was found at Hanford, according to a New Scientist article today.

Our fine state might sue the U.S. of A. after the feds missed important clean-up deadlines at Hanford last year, the Seattle Times reports. We're inclined to second that emotion. The consequences for missing a routine bathroom cleaning at Seattlest HQ are dire enough; we don't even want to try to imagine how someone thought it was okay to delay the clean-up at a nuclear waste dump. Maybe we should turn to litigation to solve the hair-clogged drain problem at HQ, as well.