Atomic Days

The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America

By: Joshua Frank

Narrated by: Will Tulin

Once home to the United States's largest plutonium production site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.

The EPA designated Hanford the most toxic place in America; it is also the most expensive environmental clean-up job the world has ever seen, with a $677 billion price tag that keeps growing. Huge underground tanks, well past their life expectancy and full of boiling radioactive gunk, are leaking, infecting groundwater supplies and threatening the Columbia River.

Whistleblowers are now speaking out, hoping their pleas can help bring attention to the dire situation at Hanford. Aside from a few feisty community groups and handful of Indigenous activists, there is very little public scrutiny of the clean-up process, which is managed by the Department of Energy and carried out by contractors with shoddy track records, like Bechtel. In the context of renewed support for atomic power as a means of combating climate change, Atomic Days provides a much-needed refutation of the myths of nuclear technology—from weapons to electricity—and shines a spotlight on the ravages of Hanford and its threat to communities, workers, and the global environment.

©2022 Joshua Frank (P)2023 Tantor

Harrowing and activating

The information is invaluable and I hope many others will take the time to read this book. It looks not only at concerning elements of the past, but also the successes of activists so far with the call to action to continue their legacy into the future. The narrator is excellent as well.

A Must Read (or Listen)!

Joshua Frank's Atomic Days is an essential read that details the egregious history and status of the Hanford site and the frighteningly mismanaged "clean up" of the nuclear sludge that the planet must endure for the next few hundred thousand years. Highly recommend!

Very Informative Story

This is a great and informative story. Government and Private Sector Cover Up. Making money but never providing a Solution.

this is more political than I thought it should be

let me start by saying, I do not follow the Democrats or Republicans lines. I vote for whoever I feel will be best. In a few minutes, you can tell the author is very Democrat. He says that the Pacific Northwest is full of dumb flag waving Republicans. Then he implied that it was wrong for the workers at Hanford to have pride in their job to help end WW2. He also goes into was nuclear bombing Japan needed to end the war. That was all in the opening. I stopped listening and going to get the book refunded

Liberal Writer Talks About Nuclear Waste

Author is obviously a liberal. Buyer beware. He implies in the prologue that conservatives are uneducated hicks in the sticks who wave flags and have no understanding about nuclear waste. He discounts the Cold War, dislikes anything capitalist, and claims the US didn’t have to bomb Nagasaki to end the war. Oh, and he’s a “graduate degree journalist” and proud of it.

Being a graduate degree conservative myself who is NOT a journalist, I found I had some questions for the author:

1. Has he ever heard of Iwo Jima and about how many Americans died there pulling every enemy out of their hidden holes and defensive positions? Has he ever used those facts to help him understand why the US did not want to invade mainland Japan in WWII?

2. Has he ever actually spoken to someone from the Greatest Generation?

3. Has he ever actually studied socialism and communism?

I could go on, given he said he hopes this book will cause “young people to revolt and demand more government oversight of Hanford.”

Clearly he still thinks government is the answer to every problem despite a nearly 80 year track record at Hanford stating otherwise. He blames the corporations who have worked at Hanford and says the DOE is understaffed and so cannot regulate properly. Really…? Your solution is to throw more government and money at the problem and think this time it will work?

Definitely a young author who if asked would
likely want to say, “socialism and communism haven’t worked because they haven’t been properly tried yet.”

Despite the liberal dribble throughout the book, if you are interested in the Hanford cleanup project as of the 2020’s, he does give facts. I suffered the whole book to learn this because I wanted to know. Buyer beware though, you have a lot of green thinking to wade through to get to those facts.

To the author: non fiction books are best when you keep your own bias out of them. Try harder next time.