Tokyo asks Nagasaki bomb maker for help in fighting Fukushima leaks
Officials fighting toxic leaks at Fukushima turn to US firm that produced plutonium dropped on Nagasaki for advice on 'cocooning' safety process
Hanford Engineer Works in the US northwest produced the 9kg of plutonium for the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.
Hanford is home to one of the most toxic nuclear waste sites in the world and is providing help dealing with the melted nuclear reactors in Fukushima.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) sent engineers to the Hanford site this year to learn from decades of work treating millions of litres of radioactive waste. Hanford also pioneered a method of sealing off defunct reactors known as concrete cocooning that could reduce the 11 trillion yen (HK$868 billion) estimated cost for cleaning up the Fukushima power station.
The Hanford site stretches over 1,500 square kilometres of scrubland, about 320 kilometres southeast of Seattle. Its laboratories and plutonium facilities were integral to the Manhattan Project to make the first atomic bomb, and it went on to produce most of the plutonium in the US nuclear arsenal. But the last of its nine reactors was shut down in 1987 in a decommissioning process that has continued to occupy thousands of technicians.