The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy

by Michael Lewis

Jared Kushner expressed surprise that so much of its staff seemed to be leaving. “It was like he thought it was a corporate acquisition or something,” says an Obama White House staffer. “He thought everyone just stayed.”

In early 1943, the United States Army was evicting everyone from an area in eastern Washington nearly half the size of Rhode Island and setting out to create enough plutonium for a nuclear bomb. The site of Hanford was chosen in part for its proximity to the Columbia River: the river supplied both cooling water, and electricity. Hanford was also chosen for its remoteness: the army was worried about both enemy attacks and an accidental nuclear explosion. And finally, Hanford was chosen for its poverty. It was convenient that what would become the world’s largest public-works project arose in a place from which people had to be paid so little to leave.

There are other nuclear waste sites in the United States, but two-thirds of all the waste is here. Beneath Hanford, a massive underground glacier of radioactive sludge is moving slowly but relentlessly toward the Columbia River.