One of my friends grew up in Hanford, Washington, the fissionable material manufacturing facility that made the Plutonium for our first nuclear explosion test (Trinity) as well as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. When I sent her the article about a recently discovered batch of pre-Trinity plutonium she shared this little bit:

When I worked at US Testing in 1967-69 we put all our radioactive waste we used for quality control when testing produce grown at Hanford in metal barrels that were later buried….. I hate to think of all those metal barrels that are still buried in the desert.

Regarding the recent find at Hanford:

An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that’s just where the first bulk batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found – abandoned at the world’s oldest nuclear processing site.

As a race we’ll probably be dealing with this persistent pollution for longer than the span of all recorded history, and some of this pollution is stored in glass jars, in rusty old safes.