Richland gets only eight inches of rain a year. And sprinkler heads are as common there as dandelions are in East Tennessee. The main administration building the Research Operations Building is a striking complex of buildings with a plaza and a pool festooned with fountains. It makes the impression that this must be the type of spanking new facility we re aiming for. Everything, in fact, looks nice and new.
Offices are well-lit and clean.
But the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory is PNNL s showpiece. As PNNL s new user facility, it has a spacious lobby and sitting area, a well-furnished conference room and laboratory space galore. Sure enough, they are similar, although EMSL s architecture is more traditional and it seems much larger and newer by more than a decade. It opened in 1997. The Hanford site in itself is vast, with its nine reactor sites spaced out along miles of desert beside the Columbia River.