Should we be spending $2 billion to clean up messes from our past?

RICHLAND, Wash.—This place looked post-apocalyptic long before the nuclear reactors turned on. I am standing within 586 square miles of nuclear fallout. Not the kind of fallout that happens after a bomb gets dropped. The kind of fallout that happens after a bomb gets built.

I may be in Richland, but I am actually at Hanford, a former nuclear production site and a place all its own. To locals, Hanford is not necessarily a town, but it's definitely a destination. This is not the Washington of your imagination, the one with pine trees, rain, and good coffee. Hanford is brown everywhere you look: brown mountains in the distance, brown tufts of grass, brown sand caking the earth. It is the perfect setting for Cormac McCarthy's next novel. So hot that people arrange outdoor meetings at 7 a.m. to beat the heat. So dry that trucks drive around all day squirting water out of their butts, wetting the sand so it can't blind workers when the winds start blowing. So bleak that even the mountains take on a dirty sheen.

Thus it became an epicenter of America's nuclear history. Remote enough to house nuclear facilities, Hanford became the laboratory of the Manhattan Project, the birthplace of the Fat Man, and a strategic center of the Cold War. It churned out two-thirds of the country's plutonium from 1944-89; in its wake are 586 square miles of contamination.

The plutonium left behind a dangerous mess. One trillion liters of contaminated groundwater; 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel; 20 tons of leftover plutonium; 750,000 cubic meters of waste buried or stored across 175 different sites; 53 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste in tanks that aren't designed to hold it permanently.