“hot spots” along the highway that runs through the heart of the Reservation. People, schools and children, soil, water, and air are exposed to highly toxic sludge materials#.

Washington State is also home to the largest contaminated nuclear facility. The 586-square-mile Hanford Site, located along the Columbia River in southeastern Washington, is a plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors and associated processing facilities. Hanford played a pivotal role in the nation's defense for more than 40 years and today is engaged in the world's largest environmental cleanup project, with a number of overlapping technical, political, regulatory, financial and cultural issues#.

Hanford storage facilities are leaking and have contaminated the water, air, and soil, according to Martín Yanez of the Northwest Social and Environmental Justice Institute. The Institute represents Latinocommunities and farm-workers who work the land and have suffered and died from different forms of cancer. With the leaking tanks of radioactive waste, the Columbia River is contaminating the groundwater used to irrigate the fields where farm-workers work, as well as the wildlife and the salmon on which the Indigenous Peoples depend on to preserve their cultural heritage and provide food for their families.

The Navajo reservation, located in the Southwestern US, is the largest in the nation. There, “the legacy of uranium development still exists today in the Four Corners Area. Hundreds of abandoned mines have not been cleaned up and present environmental and health risks in many Navajo communities. Health conditions in those communities have never been studied despite being impacted by uranium development that dates