Last October I took a tour of the Hanford Site with a busload of graduate students. Our guide was Steve Buckingham, a retiree who had worked for about 40 years at Hanford–where the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor, the Department of Energy, produced plutonium for use in nuclear weapons until 1988. He’d read War and Peace on the long company bus rides to and from work. Now he worked as a part-time tour guide, supplementing his income and, as he saw it, spreading the gospel that nuclear energy is a good thing. “I am very definitely pronukey,” he said, and off we went.
Indeed, signs here and there warned of radioactivity, and at a number of places we were not allowed to get off the bus. Nothing about the place itself, though, warned how contaminated it was. Without reading about it, we would not have known that the soil at Hanford has been estimated to contain 192 kilograms of plutonium and 142,000 kilograms of uranium. We would not have known of the releases of enormous quantities of radioactive iodine gas in the 1940s and ’50s. We would not have known that hundreds of waste-disposal sites at Hanford still probably violate government safety guidelines. The landscape told us of aridity but not of the sort of danger we were interested in: Only the human presence there–the signs, fences, armed guards–warned us away.
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Goin is a landscape photographer who was inspired to explore places like Hanford and the Nevada test site by their very secrecy. He moved to Nevada in 1984 and fell in love with the state’s basin-and-range landscapes. Yet he had to wonder what the Nevada Test Site looked like. More than twice the size of Hanford, that large chunk of the state had been closed to most outside eyes since testing began there.
In the 1960s the Atomic Energy Commission created the ingeniously named Division of Peaceful Nuclear Explosions, whose Plowshares program explored the potential for using nuclear devices as giant instant earth movers. One of Goin’s photos depicts an enormous 635-feet-deep hole that resulted when the “Sedan” explosion lifted 12 million tons of earth. Desert shrubs now dot the steep sides of the crater. The viewer can imagine the hole filling in through the slow processes of erosion and regrowth, but the time scale has to be almost geological. (The Plowshares program was abandoned when it was discovered that–surprise!–such blasts left too much residual radiation.)
Yet despite this regrowth, these places remain off-limits. The coconuts covering an atoll beach are too radioactive for human consumption; the emptiness of islands that once thrived with human life is poignant. And when Goin photographed demolished buildings at Frenchman Flat, his guide told him to spend no more than two minutes outside the car. These places are still dangerous. Of course nothing in the places themselves tells us that. A pile of coconuts is a pile of coconuts–only Goin’s telling us that they are radioactive gives the photo “Coconut Graveyard” a menacing air. The yellow warning signs and posts that mark where radioactive waste is buried at Hanford are as explicit, and as artificial.
