Project Website: hanfordproject.com
Project Dates: 2002-2004
For more than forty years, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation released radioactive contamination into the surrounding environment while producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War era. The public was not informed or warned of how these highly classified activities posed a danger to public health or the environment. Although the majority of the radioactive releases were related to production mishaps, some were planned and intentional.
Safe As Mother’s Milk: The Hanford Project examines these important events through the research and presentation of declassified historical photographs, media and other documents available from various U.S. federal government online public archives including the Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System and Human Radiation Experiments Information Management System (HREX). Since 2014, both websites are no longer accessible for online public viewing.
This project was originally commissioned and exhibited for the Cornish College of the Arts ART | ACTIVISM 2002 Visiting Artist Series. The installation of this project was exhibited at ISEA’04 in Tallinn, Estonia, during the ISEA Geopolitics of Media Conference and at Digital State: New Faculty and Student Work at SDSU at the university’s temporary community downtown art gallery in 2003.
Project Background
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is located on 565 square miles of desert in southeastern Washington State near the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick. From 1944 to 1972, Hanford workers, their families, and other downwind residents became literal guinea pigs for radiation experiments that were carried out at the facility by the former Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense, and other civilian sub-contractors including DuPont and General Electric.
Although civilians were informed of Hanford’s plutonium production activities by the end of World War II, officials kept secret the growing number of radioactive releases and other environmental safety hazards taking place or having resulted at the facility. During the mid-1980s, increased public suspicion over Hanford’s activities forced government agencies, along with their civilian sub-contractors, to release formally classified documents through a request under the Freedom of Information Act. With the release of these documents in 1986, the public has been able to piece together a devastating chronicle of atomic weaponry production that consequently poisoned the people it was ironically meant to protect. Thousands of area residents from towns and farms surrounding the Hanford site and beyond have suffered an array of health problems including thyroid cancers, autoimmune diseases and reproductive disorders that they feel are the direct result of these radioactive releases and classified experiments.
