LOS ANGELES, California – Police are responding to what appears to be a shooting with an armed person in the area where the Hanford nuclear power plant is located, in the state of Washington (western United States) and which is currently inactive.
On the website of the nuclear power plant, it was reported that local authorities are responding to information that alerts of an armed person in a building within the area where the plant is located.
As a precautionary measure, all the people who were in that building have been evacuated and the personnel who are inside the area of the nuclear power plant have been asked to stay inside and not go out into the street.
Access to the extensive area of the well-known as “Hanford Site”, which occupies more than 1,500 square kilometers.
The Hanford nuclear power plant was created in 1943, within the Manhattan project for the development of the first nuclear bomb launched in Nagasaki (Japan) and was later dedicated to the generation of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The plant, owned by the US Department of Energy, left to produce weapons at the end of the Cold War and currently the area is used to store radioactive waste.
In fact, in 2007, contained two-thirds of all high-level radioactive waste in the United States.