down. This was DReactor, which was shut down on June 25, 1967. BReactor followed on February 12, 1968. In January 1969 AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg, under pressure from the newly elected Nixon administration to cut costs, announced that the three reactors built in the 1950s, C, KE and KW, would be shut down in 1969 and 1970. The REDOX and PUREX facilities were placed on standby status in December 1967 and June 1972 respectively. Between 1967 and 1971, the number of workers employed at the Hanford Site plummeted from 8,500 to 5,500. The incremental closures did nothing to reduce the public outcry; if anything, the reverse was the case. The AEC was replaced by the Energy Research and Development Administration in 1974, and it in turn was succeeded by the DOE in 1977. The regulation and licensing of commercial reactors was devolved to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The closures left only N Reactor, which continued to operate as a dual-purpose reactor, providing power to the civilian electrical grid via the WPPSS. By 1966 it was producing 35 percent of the United States' nuclear-generated electricity. Costs were lower than anticipated, allowing the WPPSS to retire $25million budget (equivalent to $million in ) of the $122million (equivalent to $million in ) it had raised in bonds to finance the project. The Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union in April 1986 prompted multiple reviews of the safety of American reactors. Of all the reactors in the U.S., NReactor was the most similar to the ill-fated No.4 Reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in that it was graphite-moderated, although NReactor used pressurized water rather than boiling water as a coolant. Like all the Hanford Site's reactors, it had no containment vessel and would never have passed the NRC's reactor safety requirements had they been applied to it. There was a public outcry, and the Government Accountability Office recommended closure. NReactor was shut down in January 1987. The PUREX plant reopened in 1983 to reprocess N Reactor reactor-grade fuel into weapon-grade fuel. This ended in December 1988, and it returned to standby status in October 1990. The uranium trioxide plant closed in 1995, the PUREX plant closed for good in 1997, and the BPlant in 1998. The TPlant remained in use, handling the storage, packaging and decontamination of radioactive wastes. It became the longest operational nuclear facility in the world. All but one