THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

People will go out of their way to see unusual places but the thought of vacationing at the nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site is not on my bucket list. Still there are enough strange people out there who would like to do so.

The nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site is now its newest national park and thousands of people are expected next year to tour the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, home of the world's first full-sized nuclear reactor, near Richland, about 200 miles east of Seattle in south-central Washington.

While details of the new national park are still being worked out, the plan is to greatly expand the number of tourists and school groups who visit the site.

They won't be allowed anywhere near the nation's largest collection of toxic radioactive waste.

"Everything is clean and perfectly safe," said Colleen French, the U.S. Department of Energy's program manager for the Hanford park. "Any radioactive materials are miles away."

In September, the state of Washington sued the federal government alleging it had failed to adequately safeguard crews involved in the decades-long cleanup of the nuclear reservation.

The Manhattan Project National Historic Park, signed into existence in November, according to the Tri-City Herald news site, also includes sites at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Manhattan Project is the name for the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb during World War II.

At Hanford, the main attractions will be B Reactor — the world's first full-sized reactor — along with the ghost towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, which were evacuated by the government to make room for the Manhattan Project.

The B Reactor was built in about one year and produced plutonium for the Trinity test blast in New Mexico and for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, that contributed to Japan's surrender.

Starting in 1943, more than 50,000 people from across the United States arrived at the top-secret Hanford site to perform work whose purpose few knew, French said.

Well OK, if it's going to be a national park, it must be safe. Just stay in the safe areas and stay away from the cute bunny rabbits. They are quite radioactive.