May 1, 2003

Hanford Test Site

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Hanford Test Site

Location: Hanford, Washington

The Official Story: Covering 586 square miles, the Hanford site produced plutonium for nuclear weapons from 1944 to 1990. Three formal alerts have occurred in the last 13 years involving chemical explosions.

The Terrible Truth: During the December 1949 Green Run test, a massive cloud of radioactive iodine was released into the atmosphere simply to test recently installed radiological monitoring equipment. Passing over Spokane and reaching as far as the California-Oregon border, the cloud irradiated thousands of unsuspecting people. The current estimate to clean up the site’s waste is 52 billion dollars.

Fun With Atoms: The nearby Richland High School ‘Bombers’ have a mushroom cloud logo on their football helmets.

Quote: “Environmentally, [the Hanford site] is really interesting because there’s all these plants and animals that don’t exist anywhere else.” – Teri Hain, author of Atomic Farmgirl: Growing up right in the wrong place

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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