Washington’s newest national park near Tri-Cities honored with tourist passport stamp

Hanford’s B Reactor will get some extra attention from tourists across the nation after the Manhattan Project National Historical Park was picked as the centerpiece for the 2023 Passport to Your National Parks Stamp Set.

“The park turns seven this month as it debuts in the 2023 stamp set,” said Wendy Berhman, acting park superintendent. “The national stamp provides a wonderful opportunity to showcase the park and invite people to learn about and visit the park throughout the year.”

Since 1986 visitors to national parks have purchased the National Passport Stamp Set. The stamps can be pasted into there National Park commemorative passport booklet as they collect a rubber stamped “cancellation” at each national park they visit.

The annual stamp sets, which will be sold at many parks, also become collectors’ items.

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park is split among locations in Washington, New Mexico and Tennessee with each playing a role in creating atomic bombs, helping end World War II.

The park “commemorates the top-secret project that ushered in the nuclear age with the development of the world’s first atomic bombs,” explains the stamp set.

“As World War II waned in 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan — killing thousands, creating long-lasting devastation and forever changing the world,” the set says.

At Hanford, Washington, just north of Richland, B Reactor is a featured part of the national park, along with the remains of communities cleared to make way for the top secret nuclear reservation. Tours of both are available seasonally.

B Reactor was the world’s first full-scale nuclear reactor.

Some 120,000 workers came to the remote Eastern Washington shrub steppe to build the plant during World War II, finishing construction in less than a year, as the Allies rushed to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany.

The plutonium produced at the reactor fueled the first atomic bomb detonated as a test in July 1945 in the New Mexico desert and then the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park is featured as the large center stamp in a collection of 10 than honor national parks. The center stamp includes photos of historic buildings at the park’s three sites, with B Reactor at the top, and Pond Cabin in Los Alamos, N.M., and the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tenn., beneath it.

Oak Ridge produced enriched uranium to fuel the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and the atomic bombs were built at Los Alamos.

The Manhattan Project National Historical Park was selected to be featured because its locations and historical buildings represent the nation’s diverse geography, while weaving together themes of national importance, according to the National Park Service.

This story was originally published November 28, 2022 at 8:00 AM with the headline "Washington’s newest national park near Tri-Cities honored with tourist passport stamp."