Sunday, July 29, 2012

Atomic Bomb National Park

Legislation is working its way through Congress to turn our three top World War II nuclear sites -- Los Alamos, Oak Ridge (Tennessee), and Hanford (Washington) into National Parks.

Certainly these are important historical sites. However, they remained in use for decades after the war, so no doubt they were heavily modified, and then modified again during he clean up of radioactive contamination. Isn't part of Los Alamos still in use? What really remains of their 1945 appearance?

Oak Ridge is already open to the public as a National Historic Landmark, but only 1500 people a year visit. Is there really a huge audience for these sites? (Part of the original Oak Ridge reactor is shown above.)

I raise these issues because the National Park Service can't maintain the historical sites it already owns, and the more it takes on, the worse the maintenance backlog is likely to get.

1 comment:

leif said...

pork, not necessarily at its finest, but certainly pork. certainly these facilities produced devices that changed the course of history, but your economic reasoning would be difficult to outmaneuver.