Science

10 haunting photos of Idaho's Atomic City, 30 years after nuclear disaster drove everyone away

Chris Weller

2016-03-10T14:22:00Z

When photographer David Hanson arrived in Atomic City, Idaho in 1986, he knew he was capturing a still-cooling piece of American history.

While the Mountain West boomtown spent the late 1940s thriving on the power generated at the nearby nuclear complex, by the mid-1950s, a string of nuclear meltdowns had sent the town's residents searching for safer dwellings. Atomic City — current population: 29 — was left to become a shell of its former self.

Thirty years later, Hanson has finally released his haunting photographs in a book called "Wilderness to Wasteland."

Here, he walks us through what he saw.

Hanson says he first visited Atomic City in the fall of 1985. "It was a sleepy, ramshackle town located next to a secret military complex," he tells Tech Insider. There wasn't a single soul in sight.

"The town was a collection of trailers, mobile homes, dilapidated houses, a combination store/post office/gas station, and the 'Atomic City Raceway' which had hosted stock car races in the summer," he says.

Fewer than three dozen people lived there when Hanson visited, and the population hasn't changed much since.

"I was interested in this former nuclear boomtown turned ghost town as yet another example of the boom-to-bust cycles that have characterized the history of the American West," he says.

Of the 50 nuclear reactors built inside the nearby National Reactor Testing Station, only three remain.

Source: Slate

Hanson recalls how obvious it was that people lived below the poverty line. Trailers, broken down houses, and abandoned cars all pointed toward a stark lifelessness.

But similar to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, Hanson sees Atomic City as a monument, however bleak, to a once-thriving population.

"It seems frightening yet somehow appropriate that the most enduring monuments America will leave for future generations will be the hazardous remains of our industry and technology," he said.

Source: Slate.

He envisions an America that, in 150 years, will look upon Atomic City as a failed part of the human experiment to revolutionize the way people live.

That is, assuming the hollowed-out remnants of the Atomic Age are still standing.

Photography Arts & Culture