A group of Japanese scientists, government officials and company representatives visited the sleepy town of Richland, Washington, in February to seek advice on cleaning up the Fukushima nuclear crisis.
They hoped to find answers at the Hanford Site, a complex of decommissioned nuclear reactors and processing facilities that once turned out plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
The roughly 1,500-sq.-km desert facility in Benton County, which housed the first large-scale plutonium-making reactor in the world and was involved in the Manhattan Project, is now known as possibly the most heavily contaminated area in the Western Hemisphere.