The Birthplace of the Nuclear Age
Originally known as Hanford Engineer Works, the Hanford Nuclear Site was built in the early 1940s to produce fuel for nuclear weapons, including the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and effectively ended World War II. The top-secret Hanford Engineer Works was built by DuPont under contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Its purpose was to extract plutonium from spent uranium to develop nuclear bombs. The project was directed by the U.S. government's Manhattan Project, a secret atomic weapons race against Germany during World War II.