1,500 residents were displaced from Hanford in 1943; 83 years later, the Washington site holds about 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste

In a letter dated March 6, 1943, about 1,500 residents of Hanford, White Bluffs and the Priest Rapids Valley in southeastern Washington were informed in writing that their property had been requisitioned by the U.S. government under wartime powers and that they were to vacate within 30 days, giving up homes, farms and orchards built and maintained by generations of their families; evictions for some farms near the edge of the site were deferred until after the fall harvest, according to reporting by the Hanford History Project and the National Park Service, whose account of the displacement also details the evacuation schedule. The valley had been chosen months earlier as the site for the world's first plutonium production plant, part of the Manhattan Project's military effort, a history documented in U.S. Department of Energy records on Hanford and the Manhattan Project.

670 square miles acquired but no right of return