Think Out Loud

Portland writer Tom Spanbauer is being remembered -- on social media, in articles and in countless conversations with those who knew and loved him, were taught by him or simply loved his books. He died of heart failure on Saturday, Sept. 21 at age 78, after living with Parkinson's for the last eight years, according to his husband, Michael Sage Ricci. Spanbauer was born in Idaho. He moved around t...

Brue Bjornstad has loved rocks since he was a kid, growing up on the East Coast. But his real love and expertise is the Missoula Floods – cataclysmic events that scoured the Columbia Basin, and laid thick deposits of sediments in other areas, washing all the way down the Columbia Gorge and out to the Pacific. These floods also shaped the Hanford area. The lava flows and uplifted mountains al...

The Hanford nuclear reservation produced more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated waste over its decades of operation. Workers have been sickened over the years, and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups, including Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the site, and monitors the clean up process, which has be...

JJ Williams is the third-generation of his family in the wine business out of Red Mountain – one of the world’s premier viticultural areas outside of Richland, WA. But before the wine business, his family first put down roots in the Mid-Columbia region to work at Hanford. During the Manhattan Project, Williams’s great grandfather worked at the site, and then his grandfather worke...

We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work specifically at Hanford, but not all of the waste stayed there. In the rush to process plutonium at Hanford, plant operators expelled radioactive byproducts into the local atmosphere and waterways.  People who were affected by these radioactive toxins call themselves “Downwinders.” Northwest Public Broadcasting reporter Anna K...

The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the WW II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with all its 40s-era instrument panels. But it’s...

Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her.  The book explores the history of the site, the death of her best friend's...

The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different ‘farms’ spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington State. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Each...

The Hanford Reach National Monument,  established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.”  The Reach has remained larg...

Farmer Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter, and another one in his office. But they are not to tell time, or warn him of impending storms. This alarms warn him that radioactive winds from Hanford are coming. Schreiber’s Eltopia farm is in the shadow of the massive cleanup site, and the alarms are tested regularly. So far, there’s been no problem. And he says he rarely th...

Carolyn Pearce is busy digging up, cutting up and even x-raying ancient glass across the globe for study. Why? She’s trying to figure out the properties of the strongest glass on earth today, ones that have survived for thousands of years. That way the U.S. Department of Energy can be confident in its science to bind up radioactive wastes for thousands of years to come. Some of the glass she...

The history of Hanford nuclear reservation is often centered on the enormity of its original mission of refining plutonium to power the atomic bombs that would bring WWII to an end - and the clean up of the waste left behind. Robert Franklin is an assistant professor of history with Washington State University Tri-Cities and the assistant director  at the Hanford History Project. He’s m...

Long before the Hanford nuclear reservation, the land was home to Native American tribes. The Yamaka Nation has strong ties to Laliik – or Rattlesnake Mountain — and Gable Mountain on the Hanford cleanup site. They are religious sites for the Tribes, and the whole area is ceded land for the Yakama Nation. The lands around Hanford were also used for village sites, gathering, fishing, hu...

The Bureau of Land Management administers 16 million acres of land across Oregon and Washington, and wildfires burned a large swath of that land this summer, including nearly half a million acres in Eastern Oregon. For ranchers who lease BLM rangeland for their cattle, that can mean that new leases will be hard to find. The fires also threatened other uses of the land, including logging, recreatio...

More than 70% of high school teachers in the U.S. say cell phones are a major classroom distraction, according to The Pew Research Center. Across the nation schools are adapting new bans on phones as they continue to cause issues in student learning. A number of Oregon schools have been adapting new practices to minimize the use of phones in class, ranging from cell phone pouches to new district w...

The Incarcerated Individual Betterment Fund is meant to improve the welfare for people in custody in prisons throughout Washington state. The fund is supported by the money collected from phone calls and other fees from people who are incarcerated. The pot of money has swelled upwards of $12 million. But recent reporting from the Washington State Standard has found that Washington isn't using most...

Americans for the Arts, a nonprofit that advocates for arts and arts education in the U.S., released data on how the arts sector affects Oregon. The study showed that Oregon’s nonprofit arts industry generated more than $800 million in economic activity in 2022. Randy Cohen is the vice president of research for the organization. He has toured across  the country discussing findings from...

The number of students regularly missing school across the country has soared since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. A state report released last year found that more than a third of Oregon students are chronically absent, meaning they miss at least 10% of school days. State lawmakers removed truancy fines in 2021, but a new program in Umatilla County reintroduces them. As reported in the E...

After more than two decades, Portland will once again host a women’s professional basketball team. The as-yet-unnamed team will start playing in the 2026 season. The city’s last WNBA team, the Portland Fire, played from 2000 to 2002 before folding. The announcement comes roughly a year after a different deal to bring a WNBA team to the city fell through. It also comes amid an explosion...

The Western Oregon State Forest Habitat Conservation Plan, which was passed by the Oregon Board of Forestry in March, will reduce logging in western state forests to protect threatened species. Now a school district in Clatsop County is suing the state over the proposed plan. They argue reducing timber harvesting in the area could cause the district to lose millions. Alex Baumhardt is a reporter f...

For many in the U.S., it can be difficult to find a mental health provider that’s covered by insurance. But many mental health clinicians say insurance companies can make it difficult to be a part of their network. They say companies have “clawed back” payments from therapists or questioned a patient’s need for services.  Health care reporter Annie Waldman, along with...

Hearings on the proposed merger between Kroger and Albertsons ended on Tuesday in Portland. The grocery chains argue that the merger is necessary for them to compete with non-traditional grocers like Costco, Amazon and even Dollar General. But the Federal Trade Commission sued to block the deal in federal court in Oregon on the grounds that it would harm workers and consumers. Lawsuits against the...

It’s not often a new language emerges. But in the last 15 years, a new language was born right here in the Pacific Northwest. It’s called Protactile, and it was created by a group of DeafBlind people who prioritize touch. One of the people at the center of creating this new language is Jelica Nuccio. She moved to Monmouth, Oregon, where Western Oregon University just received a grant f...

Hardly a week goes by in the U.S. without a mass shooting, as the recent shooting at a high school in Georgia earlier this month reminds us of. In that tragedy, a 14-year-old student is suspected of killing two students and two teachers with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle which was legally purchased by his father. The National Rifle Association, along with some conservative lawmakers and the...

Hardly a week goes by in the U.S. without a mass shooting, as the recent shooting at a high school in Georgia earlier this month reminds us of. In that tragedy, a 14-year-old student is suspected of killing two students and two teachers with a semiautomatic assault-style rifle which was legally purchased by his father. The National Rifle Association, along with some conservative lawmakers and the...