The atomic explosion that struck Nagasaki in 1945 can be traced back to the Hanford Site, an unsuspecting desert in Washington state where colossal quantities of radioactive material were produced in the 20th century. Its days of pumping out plutonium are long gone, but the site has left a nuclear hangover that continues to curse the country. Stretching across roughly 1,550 square kilometers (600 square miles) in southeastern Washington, the Hanford Site was set up in 1943 by the Manhattan Project for the sole purpose of producing plutonium on an industrial scale. Using nine nuclear reactors a…