by Marisa De La Villa What does it mean for a war to never fully end? In southeast Washington, along the Columbia River, there is a landscape that holds with it remnants of both World War II and the Cold War– not as a memory, rather, as its physical reality. 1  The Hanford Site is not simply a historic location: it is an ongoing environmental condition. 2 Established in 1943 under the Manhattan Project, Hanford was built with urgency and secrecy, all with the goal to produce plutonium for the atomic bomb. 3  The plutonium that was used in the bombing of Nagasaki actually came from Hanford. 4 Even the name plutonium carries a certain weight.   Named after Pluto, the Roman god of the Underworld and ruler of the dead, the element was discovered only a few years before Hanford’s construction. The element was quickly tied to mass destruction– its association to death, to the god who controls it, seems somewhat prophetic. This material, drawn from the earth and weaponized, was ...