Sally Jewell says new Manhattan Project national park will tell 'the complete

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park will give people the chance to understand the development of the Atomic Bomb which ultimately brought an end to World War II. The bomb-making reactors at Hanford coexisted with the lone undammed stretch of Columbia River between Bonneville Dam and the Columbia River.

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz pledged Tuesday to work together to preserve locations in Tennessee, New Mexico and Washington tied to the historic program.

The National Park Service has set up temporary headquarters for the Oak Ridge location in the American Museum of Science and Energy, 300 S. Tulane Avenue. The site is now engaged in cleaning up the nation's largest collection of radioactive waste. Groves is honored with a street name in Richland.

"It certainly is a celebration that we will be telling the story of these three important historical sites", Jewell told reporters.

The move also applies to properties in other states that were developed in conjunction with the Manhattan project. The Y-12 nuclear weapons plant is in Anderson County.

Park Service executive Barclay Trimble said park operations will be overseen by a joint board of directors from DOE and the park service. The river's only big remaining wild salmon run, chinook salmon which return to spawn in the fall, inhabit the Hanford Reach. The monument designation protected the White Bluffs of Hanford, a major scenic attraction of the river. But the national monument has proven a major visitor draw.

Alexander said the Manhattan Project paved the way for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Oak Ridge Corridor, which now attracts "good-paying jobs to the area". Our hope is that expanding national parks isn't just justification for the federal government to acquire even more land... and in doing so restricting our freedom to access those lands.

The park, established by the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, will be managed in partnership by the interior and energy departments. Since 2008, it was a national historic landmark.

Code named the Manhattan Project, the US atom bomb effort was ultimately successful, but only after overcoming extremely hard scientific and engineering challenges. Jewell was in the Los Alamos area recently.

Work on the Manhattan Project, which conceived the atomic bomb, was commemorated in three sites: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington. It was tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945.